Re: Number of writing systems

John H. Jenkins wrote:

>
> 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.

Do we dare to ask why it was made in the first place? It certainly
suggests that absolutely no one with the slightest familiarity with the
linguistic study of writing systems was involved with the project at the
time, since the absurdity of the word is one of the first and least
controversial points in Gelb's *A Study of Writing* (1952) and has been
reiterated by every writer on writing ever since. (And Gelb knew about
DuPonceau.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...