--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@...> wrote:

> >
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here. The *primary* quality of the
> Chinese characters is their semantics -- at least, for most of
>them.

"Despite the fact that the phonological aspects of reading Chinese
words is markedly different from reading in English, many of the
same brain areas involved with English grapheme to phoneme
conversion were active. Important differences were also observed,
and these mainly involved more bilateral involvement in language and
reading-related areas, whereas English reading generally shows a
more unilateral (left hemisphere) pattern. While some differences in
brain activity could be attributed to the unique visual features of
Chinese characters (they tend to be more square than alphabetic
characters) and to the importance of tones in conveying word
meaning, it appears there are also substantial similarities in how
the brain reads Chinese and English. These similarities suggest that
there are fundamental cognitive operations involved in translating a
visual percept into a set of sounds that convey meaning"

http://www.hku.hk/fmri/index/journals/EditorialNR2001.pdf

I see reading as translating a visual graph into a *set of sounds*
that convey meaning, for both readers of Chinese and readers of
alphabets. The difference is in the degree of phonological
segmentation, although both types of writing systems are in some way
analytic.

BTW I read up to page 8 of your paper so far and understand
Unicode's position on term ideograph, I just don't think that it
is 'widely understood' that's all. I can hardly think of any term
which is more hotly debated.

Anyway this is just an aside to the 'featural syllabaries' thing.

Suzanne