At 04:11 PM 8/12/2003 -0400, Peter Daniels wrote:

>"Morphogram" means a sign that denotes a morpheme, just as "logogram"
>means a sign that denotes a word and "phonogram" (see why I use -gram?)
>means a sign that denotes a sound and "ideogram" means a sign that
>denotes an idea.

I think something that would be good to provide for the community
here, and at large, would be to pull together terms in use, "proper" or
"improper"... I know that I honestly cannot come up with an articulate
differentiation between -gram and --graph, which looks like the impetus for
the above paragraph.

For instance, a post that pulls together the various morphemes
used in the study/discussion of writing systems: ideo-, logo-, picto-,
syllabary, abugida, abjad, alephbet, asiomagraphic, etc...

I understand that the Unicode Consortium had to consider
non-jargon oriented people in mind, but I also think that if we don't use
this forum to pull together to provide adequate resources to actually
correct and provide said terminology, then ... why should we and/or how can
we really gripe about it?

>The refinement being because in (Modern) Chinese, words usually comprise
>two characters, and only rarely do the characters not both bear
>components of the meaning (one of the rare exceptions, which is a
>standard example, is the word for 'butterfly', which is two syllables
>and written with two characters at least one of which never occurs
>outside this word).

Actually, that should be Modern *Standard* Chinese (aka:
Mandarin), where phonetic attrition (from previous stages of Sinitic), has
encouraged disyllabic compounding (where the second component is usually a
bleached suffix) to "bulk up" lexical items, e.g.: shi2tou (rock+head)
"rock, stone," shi1zi (lion+child) "lion," fang2zi (room+child) "house,"
wu1zi (house+child) "room," etc. Most other more conservative dialects
retain monosyllabic forms: re: Cantonese - sek8 "rock," fOng2 "room,"
uk7(kei3) "house," etc.

-Patrick