John Jenkins wrote:

>
> 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.

"Sinogram" is an unfortunate and ethnocentric coinage of Victor Mair,
who often seems to be trying to out-Boodberg Boodberg.

The correct technical term is "logogram"; "morphogram" is a refinement.
See Gelb 1952 (and DeFrancis 1985).

> 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.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...