Re: Ideographic Conlangs

Muke Tever writes:
 > From: "Tim May" <butsuri@...>

 > > Egyptian isn't ideographic, it's logographic.  It's an important
 > > distinction - all known scripts in human history have had a
 > > phonetic component (there have been attempts* to _construct_
 > > ideographic scripts, but I don't think any of them have achieved
 > > completion, let alone been widely adopted).
 >
 > But the phonetics often become divorced from the script, and so the
 > script doesn't synchronically have _any_ phonetic component.  Isn't
 > the Japanese use of kanji like this?  One character, without any
 > change in form, can stand for several different morphs of similar
 > meaning (and probably different meaning too, but I'm not exactly
 > accomplished enough in Japanese to know any).
 >
 >
This is true, but Japanese also contains phonetic characters*.  Most
scripts contain some semantic elements, including our own - 1234<>@#$%
don't have any phonetic element - but historically we don't know of
anything approaching a complete script that doesn't have _some_ large
phonetic element (apart from Blissymbolics, which appears to be more
capable than I was aware, but it's generally only used by those who
can't use any alternative).

Really, the point is that - as a general rule - all scripts encode
particular spoken languages, as opposed to the neoplatonist idea that
heiroglyphs directly stood for ideas without the mediation of
language, which is suggested by the term "ideographic".

* Also, I think some kanji are used in situations where they're
  basically phonetic, but I'm not sure to what extent this is
  significant in the modern language.  I'm trying to remember
  something I read a long time ago, about how Chinese characters were
  first used to write Japanese - basically they'd write Chinese in
  Japanese word order, and when they came to a concept they didn't
  have a character for, they'd use a homophonous character (this is
  before the kana came into being).  Perhaps someone more knowlegeable
  than me could elaborate on this.

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