Re: Ideographic was: and how are they encoded?

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@...> wrote:
> >
> > ©ó Jul 9, 2004 2:27 PM ®É¡APeter T. Daniels ´£¨ì¡G
> >
> > >
> > > Why couldn't it simply have said "logographic" instead of
> > > "ideographic"?
> > >
> >
> > *sigh* Down this road we've been before. Because in the IT
> industry
> > the term "ideographic" was already well-entrenched.
>
> I seem to remember that the term ideographic has an authentic user-
> chosen origin.

?? There's no such thing as "ideographic writing," and Chinese people
don't speak English, so how could they have chosen that misnomer for
their script?

> What I can't figure out is how Indic scripts came to
> be called what they are instead of Aksharamala.

You mean, why did I choose "abugida" instead of some nonexistent other
extant word? As explained over and over in my publications, I wanted
something parallel to "alphabet" and "abjad" that used the names of the
letters, and nothing else was available.

> The other term has
> to be defined anyway, not that anyone can get it intuitively. Lets
> define Aksharamala instead. No extra verbiage needed. Ask someone
> from India what they would choose.

I asked Bill Bright and other Indologists available to me at the time
(which probably means Colin Masica and Norman Zide) whether there was a
word in Indic philology for what I wanted, and they couldn't think of
one.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...