Familiarity with a writing system makes the "non-obvious" parts
comprehensible, as can context.
The work is a thorough listing of usage instances that the authors could
encounter in the wild. My informants can't recall ever having seen many
of these characters. They wouldn't use them, and that they can recognize
them with sufficient context alone doesn't mean they should be regarded
as normative in any way.
Some Cantonese characters, as for Sawndip by their construction tend
to be ambiguous which often means 'something which sounds like this
known character", and therefore the meaning must be learned.
"Many characters that can be and are used for Cantonese, including both
those that are used for Mandarin as well as those that aren't have more
than one pronunciation. Many of those in the latter category and even
those with only a single pronunciation in some sort of vague
prescriptive sense are used approximately, for their phonetic value. For
those that aren't standardized, it's unclear to what extent there is
'knowledge' to learn, as this knowledge hasn't yet stabilized."
Many smart phones whilst having the infrastructure lack either the IME
or font for Cantonese characters in the SIP.
"Most" of the Cantonese that's commonly used and recognized is typeable
with Cangjie or handwriting (pen-stroke) recognition. A huge part of
HKSCS isn't actually known by the general public. Present-day usage is
also defined by what's typeable. So it's a two-way interaction. I don't
know about CN-based smartphones, though.
Stephan
