Comment 3 for bug 51407

(I'll comment both here and downstream. Please contact me directly or through gnome bugzilla in the future.)

Simply put, postmodern is closely related more to Japanese tile design, and wasn't much influenced by either Chinese tile design nor the modern standards of writing those characters. Most Chinese sets are rather pedestrian, while Japanese sets are very heavily stylized... I believe that much of it reflects original attempts to mimic brush strokes while carving into bone or other substances.

Outside of postmodern, just compare the typical Japanese set on solperama or goodmj versus the Chinese set in the wikipedia article.
- http://www.goodmj.com/mjtiles.html
- http://www.sloperama.com/mjfaq/types.htm
:vs:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong_tiles

I am planning to do a traditional mahjongg tile set, reflecting antique Chinese sets and including features intentionally dropped from Postmodern (1 bams, individual season and flower tiles, etc). These will have the thin-line characters.

If you really want to suggest changes to Postmodern's strokes, simply draw it out or point to a good example that can keep the look and feel of the current set, and I'll see what I can do.