Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese - Sino-Platonic Papers

David Moser, "Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese" Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 22 (March 1991)
"~h'ege pyn [~hzng]~ (pinzhzng ) ("This [type] ...)
The box which is written first in the component (the right half of +$)
was written as a square rather than a rectangle because of a perseverative
interference from the character 8.
Ex. 93. "# @ fi @ 77 " (4s
ta *
H & $$)
"TZi b\ei dg de bi ...' ("He got beaten [to a pulp]." lit., "nose black, face
swollen")
The bottom element of was perseverated in the execution of the
beginning strokes of s.
3.4. Haplology (R $$ i2)
Because of the relatively greater length of time required to write out a
word as opposed to pronouncing it, errors of inattention are common in
writing, and this inattention most often results in the omission of letters,
usually in the middle rather than at the beginning or end of a word (Hotopf,
1983). This fact seems to suggest that errors involving haplology would be
among the most frequent in written errors. (An example is the writing of
"instition" for "institution", or, across word boundaries, the writing of
"latestyle" for "latest style".)
This sort of error can take several forms in Chinese. One involves a
simple omission of a character, which is certainly common enough. Another
involves the omission of some character component, resulting in a hybrid
nonsense character, as in the following example:
Ex. 94. 6 6 m a a E bh $& & + 2 m m m Y 9 (bk $2 g)
"...& bi[ji\ao gaol de c6ng &..' ("...at a [relatively high] level...")
As was the case in the section above on haplology in speech,
cannibalisms (where one of two successive identical elements in the
sentence seems to "eat" the other one) are very common in writing as well,
as in the case where someone wanted to write the word "correct" in
parentheses and ended up writing "(orrect)" instead of "(correct)".
Apparently, the just-drawn parenthesis was perceived by the visual
feedback mechanism as an abstract shape - a crescent - and this
perception interfered with the arriving instructions to draw another
crescent shape (the letter 'c'). Some other examples: