Re: NATLANG/Learning : Sanskrit
| From: | Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, August 13, 2003, 2:45 |
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Phillip Driscoll wrote:
> Just F.Y.I.: The term "ideograph" is currently deprecated. The
> preferred term today is "logogram."
For some reason I have a distaste for both terms. Perhaps they
sound dated. Or sound like they'll sound dated :).
> I'm not an expert on Chinese, but it's my understanding that
> most Chinese logograms are compounds of basic symbols,
> one of which indicates the pronunciation and the other a clue
> to the meaning. One Chinese man with whom I worked told
> me that he could make an educated guess of the meaning
> if he encountered an unknown logogram.
I think he'd be making use of the context the hanzi occured in.
Many of the sound/meaning combinations are no longer helpful:
they were designed in many cases for, say, middle chinese, and
the sounds that the 'rhyme' part of the character suggested
may have changed since then.
s.
----
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.
Stephen Mulraney :: ataltane at ataltane.net :: ataltane.net