John Jenkins wrote:

>
> On Wednesday, November 7, 2001, at 05:04 PM, william bright wrote:
>
> > what's wrong with "hanzi"? that's what the chinese call them, and they
> > invented them.
> >
>
> Mandarin-speaking Chinese didn't invent them. The best we could do going
> along that route would be to go with something like "ͧͧÏýânÊ* dzÊ¿iÊ*" (sorry
> if this doesn't come out correctly, but Karlgren's bizarre romanization is
> *not* very ASCII-friendly).
>
> > of course the term is unfamiliar in the west, as is "logograph". so let
> > the
> > west become familiar with it! cheers; bill
>
> 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!

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.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...