Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 17:49 -0500 2001-11-08, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > > 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
> >
> >(Why -graph rather than -gram? Isn't the interference from "phonograph"
> >'record player' enough to decide it?)
>
> I don't know why. Phonograph? There's also gramophone. Neither are so
> common in this day of cassette tapes and CDs.... :-)

Plus, of course, Assyriologists have been calling them "logograms" for a
century and a half now.

> >Well who invented their stupid name? If CJK characters encoded "ideas,"
> >Leibniz would have had his "universal language" centuries ago. As we've
> >just been discussing at sci.lang, "ideogram" puts bad ideas in people's
> >heads.
>
> I don't know. I began working on ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode after that
> had happened. The Concise Oxford says:
>
> ideogram. a character symbolizing the idea of a thing without
> indicating the sequence of sounds in its name (e.g. a numeral, and
> many {note it does not say all} Chinese characters. Greek idea 'form'
> + -gram [forming nouns denoting a thing written or recorded (often in
> a certain way) (anagram, epigram, monogram, telegram) [from or
> suggested by Greek gramma -atos 'thing written, letter of the
> alphabet', from graphó 'write']]

I trust everyone knows that DeFrancis demonstrates conclusively (as
Duponceau had done long before) that Chinese doesn't belong in the above
entry.

> ideograph. = ideogram. [Greek idea 'form' + -graph [forming nouns and
> verbs meaning 1 a thing written or drawn etc. in a specified way
> (autograph, photograph), 2 an instrument that records (heliograph,
> seismograph, telegraph)]

Exactly. Because of #2, I prefer -gram for this whole class.

> logogram. a sign or character representing a word, as in shorthand or
> some ancient writing systems. [Greek logos 'word' + -gram]
>
> logograph. [not listed]
>
> >From what you say about Leibnitz, it seems to me that Blissymbolics
> (http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1866.pdf), at least, is truly
> ideographic. Not to say "ideogrammatic".

Yeah. I actually found a 2nd-hand copy of it somewhere, and once a
decade try to make sense of it ...

BTW thanx for your e-mail w/ pointer to website -- lots of good
technical stuff there!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...