Why do characters appear to be distorted when they appear in other characters?
When you see the words 'Adapt', 'Balance' and 'Centre' … what do you think of? You may think of ballet, gymnastics, acrobatics … no this is not what we are referring to here.
How do you think these three words could be related to Chinese characters?
Don't see the relationships?
These three words describe what strokes, the basic components of Chinese characters, need to do in a square box to create a formation (character).
1) Adapt
Why do characters appear to be distorted
when they appear in other characters?
The character can appear to be slimmer, flatter or smaller so that everything can fit into the limited space of a square box. Characters with more strokes do not get more space than characters with fewer strokes ... the strokes have to accommodate one another. In contrast, English words can extend its length with no restriction, each alphabet occupies its allocated space.
2) Balance
Different from English words which are spaced out linearly, a Chinese character fills up a two-dimensional square. To ensure that a character looks balanced, strokes are spaced out to fill up the space, tilted at different angles in different characters, lengthened or shortened.
3) Centre
The centre of a character is a good reference point for the placement of strokes in a character and for aligning characters in a line.
