The Asia/East Asian/CJK thread reminded me of one of my own pet peeves,
the use of 'ideograph' to refer to kanji.
Perhaps some of the professionals on this list can enlighten me here. I
thought that an ideograph meant that the graph stood for an idea, not a
sound or a zographic image. Since only a very small percentage of kanji
do this ... I can think of only about ten ... why do writers on Unicode
lend credence to a fundamental misconception by using this term to refer
to the whole lot?
In English, wouldn't it be better to say 'han characters' or even just
'kanji' a word which has been in at least one English dictionary now for
over twenty years?
Jon
-- Jon Babcock <jon@kanji.com>
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