> oh, and BTW, Jon, what ~10 are you thinking of? I can't think of any ...
Characters like 'above', 'below', 'center' ... depends on what you are
willing to accept as 'an idea' and when you start calling it a 'snapshot of
an action' like the words for 'music/medicine', 'learn' etc.
Apart from that it's a bit pointless to have this argument (yet again).
Linguists and sinologists and other -ists have had countless discussions on
what to call our Jih. The problem lies not only in the different native
terms used throughout the community of usage (Chinese languages, Korean,
Japanese, *Vietnamese etc) but also in the fact that it's not a 'pure' set
in the sense that they have all been derived via one process. So any term,
be it lexigraph, ideograph, logograph, zograph, hieroglyph, glyph etc ff et
ad infinitum will be in a way imprecise.
The question should be whether there is a point to this discussion? Language
isn't rocket science, we use a lot of terms which are highly imprecise or
hard to define, but as long as we know what we're referring to, that's the
problem solved, isn't it? It might be something for semanticists to discuss
what the prototypical Jih is and get embroiled about the lexical
decomposition issues and all that stuff ... but when X says 'Ideograph' on
this list, we all know what they're talking abou, it's not even like it's
not PC to say ideograph (unless I've missed something).
One is a s wrong as the others, let's just pick one and be damned to it.
Michael
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:18 EDT