Re: "Ideograph" in the Unicode Standard (was: Zhuang)

There was actually a fair amount of discussion on this issue when
editing the 4.0 book. I tried to slip the term "sinogram" in, which is
probably as accurate a term as one can get (even though not all of them
are "Chinese"), and which has the advantage of being a high-falootin'
Western way of saying "hanzi", "kanji", or "hanja". I was shot down on
the basis that, although many of Unicode authors are linguists, the
book isn't targeted for linguists, but for computer programmers who
will probably find it tough enough going as it is, without having to
learn a bunch of correct linguistic terminology at the same time.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2003, at 10:21 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> In short, "ideograph" is a term in common use despite its more than
> dubious etymology; in fact, very like "etymology" itself, which we
> still
> use despite the fact that we no longer think of it as the study of the
> "true meanings" of words (< Gk etymos 'true'), a notion historically
> at least as productive of nonsense ("lucus a non lucendo", e.g.) as the
> concept of ideographs.
>
>
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/