John Cowan wrote:

>
> Peter T. Daniels scripsit:
>
> > It's the term "ideograph" that led people like Leibniz to waste much
> > time searching for "the perfect language" (Eco). DuPonceau took care of
> > it in 1838!
>
> The newly released Unicode 4.0 book says (p. 293):
>
> The term "Han ideographic characters" is used within the Unicode
> Standard as a common term traditionally used in Western texts
> [...]. Taken literally, the word "ideograph" applies only to
> some of the ancient original character forms, which indeed
> arose as ideographic depictions. The vast majority of Han
> characters were developed later via composition, borrowing, and
> other non-ideographic principles, but the term "Han ideographs"
> remains in English usage as a conventional cover term for the
> script as a whole.
>
> In addition, the glossary (p. 1371) defines the relevant sense of
> "ideograph" thus:
>
> An English term commonly used to refer to Han characters,
> equivalent to the borrowings "hanzi", "kanji", and "hanja".
>
> 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.

The difference being that "etymology"'s components are not (seemingly)
transparent. Continuing to use "ideogram" perpetuates the false
suggestion that Chinese characters convey "ideas" rather than elements
of the Chinese language.

Unicode could have been a force for good, but chose to perpetuate the
unsatisfactory status quo.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...