From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Dec 21 2009 - 14:36:52 CST
William Overington surmised:
> I was wondering if a new character to mean Unicode could be
> devised from something like "writing that travels along wires"
> or maybe some other derivation.
>
> Any ideas?
Yes. This displays a fundamental misunderstanding both of
Chinese characters and of lexicogenesis in the languages
that most heavily use Chinese characters: Chinese and Japanese.
Chinese characters, for the most part, represent *morphemes*
in Chinese (and borrowed morphemes that come along with
Chinese lexical borrowings, primarily, in Japanese). If
you want to make up new words in Chinese, you make up those
words following the lexical rules of Chinese, and then
when you have the word in mind, you write it down using
the (already existing) characters for the morphemes in
question. There are very few circumstances where it is
useful or advisable to actually create new Chinese characters
per se. (Which is one half of John's point in his post.)
For your coinage in question, the Chinese *word* for "writing
that travels along wires" has actually existed for over
a century. It is diànbào <U+96FB, U+5832> (or simplified
<U+7535, U+62A5>). The "same" word, though pronounced
differently as denpo, is used in Japanese, as well.
More colloquially, it means "telegram", which itself was
a lexical coinage in English, based on Greek-derived morphemes,
an meaning roughly "writing that travels along wires".
In fact, Chinese also already have a word for "writing that
does not travel along wires", which has existed for
roughly a century: wúxiàn diànbào, i.e. "wireless telegram"
or "radiotelegram". So if you really want to be explicit
about specifying that your writing travels along wires,
instead of via radio waves, you can say youxiàn diànbào
or "(using) wire telegram".
Incidentally, Chinese already also has a word for Unicode:
tong3yi1ma3, roughly "uni(fied) (en)code(ing)". That word
has not been borrowed in Japanese, which for many reasons
simply prefers the phonetic borrowing: yuunikoodo.
See Charlie Ruland's post for the actual Chinese (and
Japanese) for these, as well as other variants that are in use.
--Ken
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