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Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:05PM (7 children)
I'm willing to be that if they'd phrased their questions more helpfully, a lot more of the participants would have got what they were referring to. I see this kind of thing so often in academia. The students are asked a question for which the answer, to most, is a very obvious fact once revealed. Usually this is accompanied by the lecturer's insistence that "This is not a trick question!" What normally happens is that most of the students can't come up with an answer because they adopt the reasonable assumption that most academic questions presented to them require a lot of thought or the knowledge of a little known fact. For this reason, I imagine most people ruled out the answer having to do with serif versus sans serif differences. They call it a "print variety" but even to me that hints at a stronger difference than simply the style of the typeface. People probably thought they were asking about two distinct Unicode characters. I bet if they'd phrased it in terms of the serif version having a different geometry to the sans serif, more would have got it.
It's all a bit silly. Wouldn't they have a very similar reaction if asked the same question about the letter 'a', for example?
The above sentence in TFA is so vague I'd say it's wrong. If we're comparing serif to sans serif, every character has two print versions. If we're talking about the geometric differences once the serifs are stripped from the serif font, there will still be subtle differences probably with every character. That's the nature of fonts. It's a fuzzy, social science question. The most unscientific thing is that the question was so badly formed. Anyway, I've wasted far too much of my time on this crap.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @01:59PM
I do agree with your statement. This above question would get me to answer Gg and Jj. since they they both make same to similar sounds in words.
Ga = Ja, Je = Ge
But then again my last name, most no one can pronounce correctly... it has a gl in it, most people read the g as silent or even as another letter like r or l.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @02:51PM
Unless they were specifically asking front-end software developers or typesetters, it's very likely that not a single one of those people knows anything about Unicode, serif, and sans serif.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday April 06 2018, @04:01PM (2 children)
Maybe half of the respondents have never learned to type on a typewriter, and didn't know that "lowercase" is the default and "uppercase" makes the klonking sound when you press the shift key hard and the metal thingy shifts almost a centimeter down so that the top letter is positioned to whack the ink tape.
Anyway, I prefer Baskervald ADF [www.tug.dk]. It's a serif, with beautiful but not excessively baroque Qs and gs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @06:09PM (1 child)
A centimeter?? Just how big was the typewriter you were using??
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday April 06 2018, @07:40PM
sigh. between 5 mm and 1 cm then. I don't remember, I was 12.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday April 06 2018, @06:42PM
If somebody writes down the wrong version of the letter, the problem is likely to include the way they discarded data. The task was to write down the letter, but that doesn't mean the bitmap of the representation of that letter (to most people). It may be case sensitive, but beyond that, extra information is not needed. It's a 'g'.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by forkazoo on Friday April 06 2018, @08:18PM
When I am thinking of letters that have multiple forms, should I could Latin script / Roman alphabet letters that look just like Cyrillic letters as distinct from their counterparts in the other script? Eh, Unicode has different code points for them, so I'll count them as distinct even if they look similar. What about Icelandic? That's almost exactly the same alphabet as English, except for eth and thorn. I think I'll count the overlapping sections of Icelandic and English alphabets as the same. What about diacritical marks? Extended ASCII systems usually did accented characters as distinct codepoints, but Unicode says they are just joiners on a consistent character. Does a letter plus an accent joiner count as a "different way of writing" that character?
There's basically now ay I'd know they were talking about teh fact that they noticed two different forms of lowercase g from their question. There's not nearly enough context. I think the more interesting result isn't "people don't know what g looks like" as it is "studies are sometimes based on questions that fail to get at what people are trying to understand."