於 Jul 11, 2004 6:26 AM 時，Peter T. Daniels 提到：

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

Personally, I don't find "logogram" significantly better (since they
don't represent "words", either). Nor were the editors as a whole
convinced that the sinological community as a whole has developed a
single term on which all people agree. I note that in WWS Boltz uses
"logogram" (noting that it's not entirely accurate) and Mair uses
"sinogram." We actually do introduce the term "sinogram," but I
snipped that bit because I know you personally dislike it.

> 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"?

Again, we're not attempting linguistic precision, and as such "arose"
is probably too strong a word. Following the analysis in the Shuowen,
where some characters are classed as 抵事 zhǐshì "pointing to the thing,"
and function as ideographs, even though as De Francis would doubtless
agree, they are strictly speaking abstract pictures conveying the sense
of specific Chinese words.

Which brings up one more point. The fact of the matter is that a lot
of these beasties function as "ideographs" today in that they genuine
convey abstract meaning divorced from a linguistic context. The
extensive borrowing of the characters, particularly into Japanese but
even into multiple Chinese dialects, where they can represent multiple
words or even multiple morphemes, with the precise morpheme intended
determined only by context, shows that the symbols have to some extent
become divorced from the language they were originally coined to
represent. That is, a character like 一 yī in some sense now does not,
in fact, represent the number-word "one," but represents the idea of
"one-ness" and as such can be used for multiple words in different
languages.

All this is one reason why I dislike any attempt to name them based on
their linguistic function. Some of them are in fact pictograms, but
not all. Some are ideographs, but not all. Some are logograms, but
not all. Most are morphograms, but not all. Some are phonograms. A
lot have multiple functions depending on context. (I ran into one last
night. 吧 bā is usually a final particle indicating emphasis, but in
the word 酒吧 jiǔbā—meaning "bar, that is, a place to buy alcoholic
beverages—it functions IIRC as a phonogram to represent the English
word "bar.") Nor does this reflect the way that the people in East
Asia refer to them, which is simply "Han characters" in the respective
languages. Personally, I believe that just calling them "Han
characters," or "Chinese characters," or "sinograms" is to be preferred
over other words.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/