Re: Number of writing systems

On Sep 23, 2005, at 3:39 PM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> 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?
>

The term is used in the names of some 70,000 characters in Unicode.
Experience has shown that changing character names, no matter how
wrong they are, is a disastrously bad idea, and it's not going to be
done again in the future.

There are some mistakes one just has to learn to live with.

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