Re: Ideograph?!?

From: Richard Cook (rscook@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 29 2004 - 16:11:33 CST

  • Next message: Kenneth Whistler: "Re: Ideograph?!?"

    The term ideograph has special meaning in Unicode/ISO usage. "Ideograph"
    is short for "CJK Unified Ideograph", and is one of the characters with
    mapping or reference data in the Unihan.txt database.

    Likewise, "Radical" has special meaning. CJK Radicals are found in two
    places, in the "Kangxi Radicals" block, and in the "CJK Radicals
    Supplement". (Actually, there is also a third block of radicals, "Yi
    Radicals", but these are not CJK).

    CDL provides a way for precise description of any CJK Unified Ideograph or
    Radical. Please see <http://www.wenlin.com/cdl/>, and the "Jargon Notes".

    In other contexts (beyond Unicode) both of these terms have different or
    broader usages. Radical, for example, is a 'lexicographic indexing
    component' (used in Radical/Stroke indexes), and ideograph is 'idea
    writing' ...

    On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Clark Cox wrote:

    > On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 15:13:51 -0500, Flarn <flarn2003@megapipe.net> wrote:
    > > What's an ideograph?
    >
    > An ideograph (aka ideogram) is (from www.m-w.com):
    >
    > "a picture or symbol used in a system of writing to represent a thing
    > or an idea but not a particular word or phrase for it"
    >
    > > Also, what's a radical?
    >
    > A radical is, in the set of Han characters, a symbol that occurs as
    > part of other ideographic characters that often serves to show common
    > meaning or history to the character. In many ways, radicals are to Han
    > characters as Greek and Latin roots are to English words.
    >
    > for instance, in Japanese, the character 妊 (U+598A) means "pregnant",
    > and contains, as a radical the character 女(U+5973), which means
    > "woman".
    >
    > --
    > Clark S. Cox III
    > clarkcox3@gmail.com
    > http://www.livejournal.com/users/clarkcox3/
    > http://homepage.mac.com/clarkcox3/
    >
    >
    >



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