John Jenkins wrote:

>
> On Dec 13, 2003, at 3:58 PM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > John Jenkins wrote:
> >>
> >> 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."
> >
> > Morphogram would be better, but then you have to explain what morphemes
> > are.
> >
>
> If you *have* to have a function-based vocabulary,

As opposed to??

> morphogram is
> probably about as good as you can get. The problem is, of course, that
> not all of them are morphemes, either; a very small number are purely
> phonetic and have no inherent meaning.

All typologies leak. Absolute typologies leak absolutely.

> > Why do you dislike logogram?
> >
>
> 'Cuz they're not words. I think that de Francis sometimes
> overemphasizes this point, but most actual words in modern Chinese are
> polysyllabic.

But monosyllabic words do exist and are where it all started. The
problem is the unfamiliar concept of "morpheme." It's not easy to get
across, believe me.

> I tend to lean towards sinogram because it's the (slightly pretentious)
> Western equivalent of what they're called in East Asia, and because it
> doesn't pretend to describe how they function. Of course, it's wrong,
> too, since they're not all Chinese.

It's one of far too many Mairian coinages. At least he stopped using
"tetragram" when I said I couldn't see how it fitted into the existing
terminology of trigram and hexagram.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...