Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> 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!

However, we should not forget that The Unicode Standard is an information
technology specification, NOT a book about grammatology or linguistics.

For this reason, the Unicode Gang *had* to use the terminology and
conventions which are more familiar and useful to *software engineers*,
rather than to linguists.

Unicode character names are often absurd or plain wrong, because they had to
adopt ISO naming conventions which are often absurd or plain wrong.

> 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.

In linguistics and grammatology that's true; but in many engineering fields
(such as computers and typography) the term is unfortunately still alive.

It is not that the Unicode Gang did not know that "ideograph(ic)" is
inappropriate terminology (in fact this is also clearly stated in the book's
glossary), but they had to use it willy or nilly.

The message to you linguists could be: ignore the silly terminology and
character names, and enjoy the possibilities that Unicode gives you when
writing your next book stuffed with funny symbols and letters.

_ Marco