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In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan22211810@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp> ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:

[Regarding 3 vs. 4 stroke grass radical...]

>I don't care how many strokes there are. BUT, for once, I STRONGLY
>DISAGREE.  If you ask ordinary Japanese of modern Japan in the street,
>they would say that the characters using the radical mentioned in the
>upper position above and the characters using the radical mentioned in
>the lower position above are CERTAINLY DIFFERENT. I would bet about
>1/3 to half the people would even say, "you are writing an INCORRECT
>characters."!

That they are judged different is not the issue; the issue is whether
a person can read the text (i.e., is it legibile).  Even Japanese who
would judge it incorrect could still read it, and, yes, they *may*
notice it, surely they would in a typeset document, but would they notice
it in a 14-point screen font?

Perhaps I grew up being trained that a dollar sign always had a vertical
line extending completely through the <S>.  If I saw a Courier dollar
sign <$> [I'm using a Courier font here], I might say:  this is an
INCORRECT character.  But I would not misunderstand it!

The point is that there is no situation in Japanese where having a
3 or 4 stroke grass radical makes a difference in meaning.  From a
linguistic perspective, these would be called "allographs" of a single
"grapheme".  A collection of allographs of a grapheme are those symbols
which instantiate the grapheme and which, if any other allograph is
substituted, does not create a difference in meaning.  For example,
the grapheme <$> has a number of allographs, one with one vertical
stroke, one with two, intersecting or non-intersecting vertical strokes;
lower case <a> and <g> have two common allographs each, etc.

If you can show me a text where the difference between a 3 and 4 stroke
grass radical makes a difference in meaning, then I may agree with you.
[I would exclude from this test a text which is artifically making a
distinction, e.g., to create a pun based on the written form of the
character.]

Your arguments on "correctness" are based on aesthetic criteria, and
not on meaningful distinction.  The Han unification makes only the
latter the criteria for distinctness of abstract form; the notion of
form "abstraction" is simply the removal of aesthetic criteria.

If you must maintain aesthetic distinctions between different forms of
a single unified Han character, then you must use some form of rich
text, e.g., escape sequences, out-of-band style data, or whatever it
takes to allow your system to display that single character differently
depending on its linguistic (or font) context.

Glenn Adams