suzmccarth wrote:

> > What do you think "logographic" means?
>
> It implies to me a lexical mapping rather than phonological and
> morphological mapping between written and spoken language.
> Logographic would mean to me that Chinese characters represent
> words. Have I somehow misunderstood this meaning of logographic? I
> realize it is broadly accepted as a descriptive term but it seems
> that it obscures comparisons between writing systems that are useful
> for observing how people interact with a writing system - problems
> in reading and writing.

Yes. "Logographic" means that what the symbol encodes is a word (a
morpheme, to be more precise). Or, as C. F. Hockett put it, a
logographic system is a syllabary that distinguishes homophones. How
does that suggest that it _doesn't_ provide ("rather than") phonological
or morphological "mapping"? A morpheme is a correlation between form and
meaning.

A phonographic writing system encodes only the phonological part of
language. A logographic writing system encodes both the phonological and
the semantic part.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...