Re: NATLANG/Learning : Sanskrit

Stone Gordonssen scripsit:
> >> Just F.Y.I.: The term "ideograph" is currently deprecated. The
> >> preferred term today is "logogram."
> >
> >Hmm, 'logogram' itself is kind of dated, isn't the more precise word
> >'morphogram'?
>
> It is felt that any of these is a truly more accurate word for the concept?
> And if so, why?
The whole truth, which cannot be readily summarized in a compound
word of reasonable length, is that a zi4 (in the sense "character")
represents a morpheme of Chinese which is at most one syllable long.
(There is only one zi4 that represents less than a syllable, namely the
one for "-r".)  A variety of hacks and kludges are used to pick suitable
zi4 to represent the syllables of a multisyllabic morpheme (essentially
all of these are borrowings).

This is neatly reflected by the fact that another sense of zi4 is
"morpheme", and that this is an ordinary term in Chinese (as opposed to
ci2, "word", which is a technical term of linguistics and lexicography).
If you want to know what the word "jiguang" (laser) means, you ask not
"What does the word 'jiguang' mean?" but instead (literally) "'Ji'
and 'guang', these two zi4, what do they mean?"  (Answer: "stimulated"
and "light", reflecting the expansion of the acronym "laser" as "light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation".)

--
"In my last lifetime,                           John Cowan
I believed in reincarnation;                    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
in this lifetime,                               jcowan@reutershealth.com
I don't."  --Thiagi                             http://www.reutershealth.com

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