Re: Number of writing systems

John H. Jenkins wrote:

>
> On Sep 22, 2005, at 8:09 PM, suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > Not to mention the everlasting suggestion that 'ideographic' is a
> > term that is 'widely understood', rather than 'widely
> > misunderstood'. If 'ideographic' is a legacy term that could be
> > explicitly explained and one could learn to live with it.
> >
>
> "Widely understood" by non-specialists. Most educated people would
> know what is meant by "Chinese ideograph," whereas "Chinese logogram"
> would be less understood.
>
> In any event, Unicode is stuck with the term "ideograph" now and
> can't get rid of it.

Why? Has it been enacted by a Constitution and only a Supreme Court can
alter it?

> > I realize DeFrancis is considered obscure for some reason unknown to
> > me, since I think his books are great.
> >
>
> No, he's not obscure. Everybody thinks his books are great. I do
> need to re-read them to see how he handles the use of kanji in
> Japanese and hanja in Korean, but his books are IMHO a sine qua non
> for anyone interested in East Asian writing.
>
> > One can even read many selections of his books online - it doesn't
> > cost a penny.
> >
> > http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
> >
>
> FWIW, the ideograph myth is also discussed in the latest version of
> my paper, "The Dao of Unihan," at <http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
> Unicode/DaoOfUnihan.pdf>
>
> > However, I take it 'morphosyllabic' is not 'satisfactory'. I can
> > only assume that this is because it does not sufficiently befuddle
> > the reader.
> >
>
> Something like that. :-)
>
> Part of the problem of naming these beasts is that they come close to
> being ideographic (their base meanings are relatively stable across
> languages, e.g., Chinese dialects, Chinese/Japanese/Korean), but some

Why would cross-linguistic phenomena be relevant to the characterization
of the elements of a language's writing system? In Chinese, they're
logosyllabograms; in Japanese and Korean they're logograms.

The one thing they definitely are not is "ideograms," whether or not
that word is "popular." Continuing to use it is the perpetuation of the
myth that they represent "ideas" and could be used to "write" any
language.

> are words in their own right, some are morphemes, some are purely
> phonetic. Really the only truly sensible approach is to do what East
> Asians do, call them "Chinese characters," and have done with it.
> Naming them by function always runs afoul of the exceptions.
>
> > Is it true that for Chinese, "the units of the writing system are
> > used primarily to write words and/or morphemes of words" - surely
> > there is a primary relationship between the graphs and the sound
> > patterns at the syllable level - no?
> >
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here. The *primary* quality of the
> Chinese characters is their semantics -- at least, for most of them.
> In Chinese -- but not in Japanese -- each graph represents a single
> syllable, but not necessarily the same syllable, depending on
> context. In Mandarin, roughly 25% of the characters have multiple
> pronunciations. If you take into account their function in Japanese,
> you more frequently encounter cases where there are multiple
> syllables in the reading for a character and multiple, very different
> readings.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...