Andrew C. West wrote:

>
> Patrick Chew wrote :
>
> > At 12:04 AM 8/7/2003 -0400, John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> >
> > >Historically Zhuang was not written. It is now being written in the
> > >Latin script, being a Pinyin-type system augmented with the tone
> > >letters U+01A7/U+01A8 (2), U+0417/U+0437 (3), U+0427/U+0447 (4),
> > >U+01BC/U+01BD (5), U+0148/U+0149 (6).
>
> Actually, the unwieldy Zhuang phonetic alphabet devised in 1955 that uses a
> mixture of Latin, Cyrillic and IPA letters together with the special tone
> letters encoded at U+01A7/01A8 [tone 2], U+01BC/01BD [tone 5] and U+0184/0185
> [tone 6] (not U+0148/0149) is no longer in official use, but since 1981 has been
> replaced by a new phonetic alphabet using ordinary Latin letters only. An
> interesting feature of the old Zhuang alphabet is that the tone letters U+01A8,
> U+0437, U+0447, U+01BD and U+0185 (for tones 2-6 - tone 1 is implicit) are
> deliberately designed to look like the numerals 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 respectively.
>
> > hrm... I seem to remember that there were a few texts written in
> > Zhuang that used a modified Sinitic script.. .kind of like the <idu> system
> > for Korean, etc...
>
> There was indeed a tradition of writing Zhuang using a mixture of existing
> Chinese ideographs (to represent either the pronunciation or meaning of a Zhuang
> word) and specially devised ideographs that represent the meaning and/or the
> pronunciation of a Zhuang word in the same manner as the Vietnamese nom script.

Neither Chinese nor Zhuang is or was written with "ideographs." As you
say, they denote pronunciation and/or meaning, not "ideas." The
appropriate term is "logograph," or if you want to be picky
"morphograph."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...