On Sep 24, 2005, at 7:16 PM, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> 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.)

The term was, as I understand it, inherited from pre-Unicode encoding
systems and understood at the time to be technically incorrect.

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