"John H. Jenkins" wrote:
>
> At 4:16 PM -0600 6/1/01, Jon Babcock wrote:
> >The Asia/East Asian/CJK thread reminded me of one of my own pet
> >peeves, the use of 'ideograph' to refer to kanji.
> >
> >Perhaps some of the professionals on this list can enlighten me
> >here. I thought that an ideograph meant that the graph stood for an
> >idea, not a sound or a zographic image. Since only a very small
> >percentage of kanji do this ... I can think of only about ten ...
> >why do writers on Unicode lend credence to a fundamental
> >misconception by using this term to refer to the whole lot?
>
> We use the term "ideograph" because it's traditional, not because
> it's correct. We can make this more explicit in the next edition of
> the book, of course. Meanwhile, the glossary does give the
> definition, "(1) Any symbol that primarily denotes an idea (or
> meaning) in contrast to a sound (or pronunciation)S(2) A common term
> used to refer to Han characters."
"common" among whom? of course, Unicode is a Standard, and if it says
it's common, fiat lux! :-)
