On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 08:26:17 -0400, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> 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'.)

Indeed; when I decided to try to learn some kanji, I discovered the Nelson
JP->EN dictionary, and was quite surprised to discover how many kanji were
defined more as specific related classes of concepts, with implications,
than very explicitly and "tightly". Around that time, I also read that
katakana are used for legal documents. (Considering th number of
homophones in Japanese, does such use of katakana still leave room for
ambiguity? It must not, but I have no idea how.)

{reopening a thread}
It's quite hard to resist telling the tale (iirc in Flesch, _Why Johnny
Can't Read_) about the child who's learning to read by "whole word". Child
is reading aloud, sees the word "stool", and hesitates, finally saying
"chair".

Indeed, I'm coming to realize that I probably have a good memory for
appearances of words, a logographic memory, because a misspelled word
generally looks odd. My only formal training was essentially
phonic/phonetic, from my mother, and I must have had an aptitude for it.
{offering to close the thread, again}

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
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