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 <[email protected]> [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 <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 2013年1月30日, at 上午4:50, Andreas Stötzner
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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.
