Re: Ideograms

Yes, and on page 145 DeFrancis comes to the following conclusion:

/Chinese characters represent words (or better, morphemes), not ideas,
and they represent them phonetically, for the most part, as do all real
writing systems despite their diverse techniques and differing
effectiveness in accomplishing the task./

The chapter these lines are from is also on-line:
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html .

Charlie

* Tim Greenwood <timothy_at_greenwood.name> [2013-01-30 20:17]:
> A very accessible book on all this is "The Chinese Language: Fact and
> Fantasy" by John De Francis, published in 1984 by University of
> Hawaii Press. There is a brief synopsis on Wikipedia
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy
>
> - Tim
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 1:46 PM, John H. Jenkins <jenkins_at_apple.com
> <mailto:jenkins_at_apple.com>> wrote:
>
>
> On 2013年1月30日, at 上午4:50, Andreas Stötzner
> <as_at_signographie.de <mailto:as_at_signographie.de>> wrote:
>
>> Most ideographs in use are pictographs, for obvious reasons. But
>> it would be nice indeed to have ideograms for “thanks”,
>
> 謝
>
>> “please”,
>
> 請
>
>> “yes”,
>
> 對
>
>> “no”,
>
> 不
>
>> “perhaps”
>
> 許
>
>> – all those common notions which cannot be de-*picted* in the
>> true sense of the word.
>>
>
> I'm not being entirely snarky here. The whole reason why the term
> "ideograph" got attached to Chinese characters in the first place
> is that they can convey the same meaning while representing
> different words in different languages. Chinese writing was one of
> the inspirations for Leibniz' Characteristica universalis, for
> example.
>
> Personally, I think that extensive reliance on ideographs for
> communication is a bad idea. Again, Chinese illustrates this. The
> grammars of Chinese and Japanese are so very different that
> although hanzi are perfectly adequate for the writing of a large
> number of Sinitic languages, they are completely inadquate for
> Japanese. Ideographs are fine for some short, simple messages
> ("The lady's room lieth behind yon door"), but not for actually
> expressing *language*.
>
> And, in any event, if you *really* want non-pictographic ways of
> conveying abstract ideas, most of the work has been already done
> for you.
>
>
>
Received on Wed Jan 30 2013 - 14:13:52 CST