On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> BTW, I don't see a problem of political correctness here. The terms used by
> Japanese or Korean themselves (kanji and hanja, respectively) litterally
> means "Han or Chinese characters".
They have the advantage of having more than one morpheme/word that maps to
English "Chinese". e.g., in Japanese, there is "chuu" vs. "kan", such as
the near-minimal pair chuu-goku-go 'Chinese language (lit. language of
China)' vs. kan-go 'word composed of Sino-Japanese morphemes'.
Perhaps if "Han" is too unfamiliar a word to be used directly, "Sino" or
"Sinitic" could be used as translations to convey the same meaning without
using the overloaded term "Chinese" (language, culture, origin, ethnicity,
nationality, etc), e.g., "Sino characters", "Sinitic characters".
> Rather, there is a possible technical
> incorrectness, because the term hides the fact that Japanese and Korean also
> use their own local phonetic characters.
Unfortunately, similiar technical incorrectness already exists, e.g., the
Japanese-enabled (and probably localized as well) version of a product,
website, etc is sometimes known as the "kanji version", despite the
presence of kana; similarly, the Korean version is sometimes (almost
always?) labeled as the "hangul version", despite the rare use
of "ideographs". Actually, what's worse is that "hangul" is often used
rather the name of the language--one'll see a list of choices like
"English, Francais, Deutsch, Nihongo, Hangul..." (the last not in Latin
script, of course, but its own. (I won't go into how "simplified Chinese"
is an abused and misunderstood term, for now.)
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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