Allen Haaheim provided some further detailed clarification: > Note that Han characters are logographic, not ideographic. That is, > they are graphemes that represent words (or at least morphemes), > not ideas.
This correctly states the situation for the normal case for Chinese characters used writing the Chinese language in most instances. But as is not unusual for real writing systems, the situation gets blurred all around the edges. For one thing, Chinese has characters which are simply used for their sound, as syllabics. In some instances, they are characters in dual use, as logographs *or* as syllabics, but in either instance they are used to "spell out" foreign words irrespective of the morphemic status of the orginal characters -- or the morphemes of the foreign word, for that matter. And the situation is also not so clear when considered in the dynamic context of the historical borrowing of the Chinese writing system to write unrelated languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Much of the writing system borrowing was *attached* to words -- in other words, the vocabulary itself was borrowed in from Chinese, using the Chinese characters to write it. But Japanese and other languages faced the problem of how to adapt the writing system for preexisting, *native* vocabulary, as well as for all the borrowed words from Chinese. And a variety of strategies evolved, some of which involved abstracting the *meaning* of a Chinese character, and then reapplying the character to write an unrelated word in Japanese (for example) which had a similar meaning. This semantic-based transference of Chinese characters completely ignored morphemic status in Chinese, as the whole point was to simply find the appropriate character to express the lexical semantics of the historically unrelated (but semantically similar) word(s) in the borrowing language. During such a borrowing transition, you can conceive of the process as many Chinese characters temporarily "floating off" their morphemic anchors in Chinese, being considered purely semantically, and then reattaching to a new set of morphemic anchors in Japanese, where they subsequently evolve with new lexical histories in another language. > But somehow "ideograph" has become the standard term in use outside > the field of experts in Chinese linguistics (because of Ezra > Pound et al., perhaps?). I don't think you have to look to Ezra Pound's poetic misrepresentations of the nature of Chinese to find reasons here. "East Asian ideograph" and "CJK ideograph" caught on as acceptable compromise alternatives for "Chinese character" or "Japanese character", which were language-specific and misleading (in the Japanese case), or for transliterations such as kanji or hanzi (also language-specific), or for sinogram or sinograph, which were too little known (and also too Chinese-biassed for some). "East Asian logograph" would have been technically a little more correct, but not absolutely right, either. "Ideograph" wasn't used because the standardizers were confused about how Chinese and Japanese writing systems worked, but simply because it was a usable term in the right ballpark, available for a specialized technical usage, and less objectionable than most of the alternatives. As Asmus and Richard implied, "ideograph" should simply be treated as polysemous now. It has a narrow technical sense applying to the character encoding world, where it effectively is equivalent to kanji/hanzi/hanja. And it has a separate graphological sense where it refers to signs (like symbols marking restroom doors) that represent ideas directly without being attached to specific words or morphemes of a particular language. --Ken > > I hope this doesn't confuse matters.
