Stylized, Incorrectly Written, or Completely Normal?

[Vildhjerp]

 

Okay, this has been bothering me for a while now. And chances are, I'm just overreacting.

 

In class, whenever we start a new chapter, the first thing our textbook provides is a vocabulary list containing all the core and supplementary vocabulary used throughout the chapter. And while skimming through these lists of already familiar characters for the first time, one will always catch my attention and cause me to double take. There are characters printed in my textbook that I recognize, but are written in ways I've never seen before, and I can't for the life of me determine whether they are written incorrectly or just stylized. But at the same time, I can't imagine a textbook being published that displays incorrectly written characters. And seeing how the characters are written out stroke by stroke with absolutely no run, there's no excuse to have strokes in the wrong place when the "brush" is leaving the page between strokes.

 

If it isn't already obvious:

起：I'm used to seeing 己 in the upper right rather than 巳.

過：I'm used to seeing the box inside the upper part flush with the left side rather than the right.

船：I'm used to seeing 几 in the upper right rather than 儿.

And these are just a few examples.

 

Perhaps these are classical ways of writing these characters. Maybe it's totally okay to write them like this and I've just never seen it before. I have no idea. The textbook says nothing about it. I habitually think about Chinese as the "there's only one way to do it correctly and that's it" language ...but then I take a look at its grammar and that idea falls apart immediately. Heh.

 

I'd love any sort of input. Thanks, guys.

[xiaokaka]

These are differences in font standard in PRC vs Taiwan. You can compare PingFang SC vs PingFang TC (see the attachments). You can read more here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Variant_Chinese_character and here: http://blog2.skritter.com/2015/05/dealing-with-font-issues-when-learning.html

[Vildhjerp]

That's all I need. Thanks a ton, xiaokaka!

[roddy]

This is a frequently asked question, which on Chinese-forums.com means about once a year. Anyone need to know how to get 女 out of a Pinyin IME? 

[Vildhjerp]

My bad, roddy. When I confronted my professor about these, about two or three hours before I posted this question, he didn't have much to say about them.

 

"This is... uhh... 这个... 这个typeface呢, different typeface." He's from Taiwan, so I'd expect him of all people to have seen these before.

 

But hey, one more person understands now. I'd say that's net gain. I'll try to put a little more effort into my preliminary research next time.

[roddy]

Oh, no apology needed - you can't search for something if you don't know what it's called... Just thought the extra links might be useful.