Re: Ideograms

I happen to disagree slightly with De Francis on this point, BTW. Senso strictu, he is correct, but looking at it in such a limited way minimizes the cross-language utility of sinograms. 花 *means* "flower" whether it's Mandarin "huā" or Japanese "ka" or Japanese "hana". Indeed, the fact that the same kanji can be used for both native Japanese words and Chinese loan-words illustrates my point.

De Francis' point is that you can't use hanzi for real communication other than the most basic (e.g., street signs). 花 means "flower" in China and Japan because it represents the Chinese morpheme for "flower" and the Japanese equivalent, not because it has any inherent "meaning" per se. I feel that since many hanzi represent equivalent morphemes in several different languages, they can actually be said to have inherent "meaning" for all practical intents and purposes.

A Japanese reader can see the sentence "我有一只猫。" and come away with a general sense that it has something to do with "a cat," but they can't *read* it any more than a Chinese speaker can truly read the sentence "私は猫を所有している。" OTOH, both Japanese and Chinese can find 日本 on a map without any trouble, since it means "day-root" in both languages. (Actually, it means "Japan" in both languages, but it literally means "day-root", too, and I think that sounds more poetic.)

On 2013年1月30日, at 下午12:08, Charlie Ruland <ruland_at_luckymail.com> wrote:

> 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> wrote:
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>> On 2013年1月30日, at 上午4:50, Andreas Stötzner <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”,
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>> 請
>>
>>> “yes”,
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>> 對
>>
>>> “no”,
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>> 不
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>>> “perhaps”
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>> 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 - 15:22:21 CST