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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: 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."