On Dec 13, 2003, at 11:20 AM, Patrick Chew wrote:

> I think it's a given that we acknowledge that there are
> "phonetic"
> components to Han logograms (hrm.. will this be a safe term to use?)

Nah. I think I dislike the term "logogram" about as much as Peter
dislikes "ideograph."

(This is one of the many reasons why Unicode sticks with "ideograph."
It doesn't favor one nomenclature or another because everybody hates
it.)

> I wonder, though, how is it, then, that we can "derive" or
> access
> the phonetics from the _base_ graphemes? If broken down to the set of
> graphemes used as "phonetic" components, there seems to be an
> overwhelmingly large set of overlap (with *semantic* distinction)
> given the
> range of the phonology - even if using reconstructed phonologies for
> Old
> Chinese or Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
>

I'm sure this has been studied. Richard Cook of Berkeley has done some
studies I know of using the traditional Chinese fancie system of
indicating pronunciation, and found that the whole process is rather
circular.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/