At 16:17 -0500 2001-11-08, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > This was actually argued out at some length not long ago on the Unicode
>> mailing list. The upshot of it all was that yes, we know "ideograph" is
>> wrong, but it's what's been used in the west for centuries and there
>> really isn't a potential replacement which is significantly better and
>> simple.
>
>Well, that certainly says something about the Unicode gang: use what's
>convenient instead of what's right. I gather that's been the approach to
>the whole project!

That's not at all fair to "the Unicode gang", nor is it accurate, I
am afraid. We strive to encode the world's writing systems accurately
and correctly so that the world's data. We try to give characters
good names. Sometimes it gets done wrong. My favourite bugaboo is
LATIN LETTER OI, which if course is Turkic GHA. We had to use
"Myanmar" instead of "Burmese" for political reasons. The first is an
error, people naming the character without knowing what it was. The
second is a practical compromise which got the Myanmar national body
to sign up to the encoding more easily, and that was a good thing for
millions of Burmese. Our approach is, indeed, to be practical. We are
also adding in terms like abugida and abjad in the next version of
the standard, I believe.

>The notion of "ideogram" was debunked as long ago as 1838, by Peter
>Stephen Duponceau, so there's really no excuse for its hanging on.

For good or for ill, the standard uses, for various reasons, the term
"ideograph". (**Not** "ideogram".) And the standard was approved a
decade ago, and it's not possible to change certain aspects of it
(such as names) for purposes of compatibility of various kinds.

That said, it should be pointed out that those responsible for the
CJK characters in the standard are those who belong to the IRG, the
Ideographic Rapporteur Group, which reports to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.
This group is made up of the national bodies and/or industrial groups
of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and the
U.S. Work continues to encode missing Hanzi characters, whether they
are denotated as "ideographs" or as "logograph" or whatever else one
may prefer.
--
Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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