Re: Ideograms (was: Spiral symbol)

From: Tim Greenwood <timothy_at_greenwood.name>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:17:06 -0500

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:

>
> 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”,
>
>
> 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 - 13:19:41 CST

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