John H. Jenkins wrote:

>
> ©ó Jul 10, 2004 9:15 PM ®É¡Asuzmccarth ´£¨ì¡G
>
> > I should probably explain one of the many reason I looked up qalam.
> > I was reading the Unicode version 4 and it said something to this
> > effect. Chinese characters are ideographic.
>
> No, it doesn't say that. It says (p. 293), "The term 'Han ideographic
> characters' is used within the Unicode Standard has a common term
> traditionally used in Western texts,¡KTaken literally, the word
> 'ideograph' applies only to some of the ancient original character
> forms, which indeed arose as ideographic depictions. The vast majority
> of Han characters were developed later via composition, borrowing, and
> other non-ideographic principles, but the term 'Han ideographs' remains
> in English usage as a conventional cover term for the script as a
> whole." This is the second paragraph of the description of the "CJK
> Unified Ideographs" block. (The first one explains why we keep saying
> "Han.")

So that was the perfect opportunity to introduce a _better_ term! You
could say "Han," but you couldn't say "logogram"?

BTW, what's your evidence that they "indeed arose as ideographic
depictions"? Do you have some reason to believe that any particular
character didn't stand for some specific word, but for a semantic field
or "idea"? (I have explained that English is [very mildly] logographic
because of bomb/comb/tomb, where you need to know the word before you
can pronounce it; but <tomb> can only represent 'tomb' and never
'mausoleum' or 'crypt' or 'grave'.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...