At 4:16 PM -0600 6/1/01, Jon Babcock wrote:
>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?
We use the term "ideograph" because it's traditional, not because
it's correct. We can make this more explicit in the next edition of
the book, of course. Meanwhile, the glossary does give the
definition, "(1) Any symbol that primarily denotes an idea (or
meaning) in contrast to a sound (or pronunciation)Š(2) A common term
used to refer to Han characters."
>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?
>
"Kanji" would not be much better IMHO than "ideograph," because it's
the Japanese word. If we *were* to use a word from an East Asian
language, "hanzi" would be best. (I'm tempted to say that "Honjih"
would be best, but I'll be a good boy and resist.)
-- ===== John H. Jenkins jenkins@apple.com jenkins@mac.com http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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