John H. Jenkins wrote:

>
> ©ó Jul 9, 2004 10:31 AM ®É¡Asuzmccarth ´£¨ì¡G
>
> > This comment on Chinese is found in Unicode version 4. I am trying
> > to find out what it is doing there. There may be some opaque and
> > ideosyncratic explanation for this like there is for so many other
> > things. Who knows?
> >
>
> The Unicode Standard is a book about computer representation of written
> language. It's no more a book about linguistics than Genesis is a
> geology text. While much of Unicode is informed by linguistic theory,
> the authors feel under no obligation to be as precise about linguistic
> terminology as they would if they *were* writing a linguistics text.
> (OTOH, we do feel obligated to be precise when it comes to matters of
> encoding practice.) This is why we use the term "ideograph," which we
> wouldn't use were we writing for linguists. The sentence you refer to
> is a first-order approximation of the actual situation, written for
> computer engineers. We know it isn't precisely true, but to phrase the
> sentence with its proper exactitude for a linguistics setting would
> simply be obfuscation so far as the actual intended audience is
> concerned.

Why couldn't it simply have said "logographic" instead of "ideographic"?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...