Quote:
Originally Posted by ColinHowell
One more nit-pick, sorry.
(emphasis added)
You really shouldn't use the word "cuneiform" either for kanji or for the Chinese writing system that kanji is derived from. Cuneiform only refers to the writing system used in ancient Mesopotamia, with its distinctive wedge-shaped marks; the very name " cuneiform" derives from the Latin for "wedge-shaped". (For similar reasons, "hieroglyphic" is also a bad choice; that term is normally used only for the ancient Egyptian writing system.)
A much better term for kanji and Chinese writing is "logographic".
In a logographic system, each character (or logogram) represents a word or word-element. Hence the use of the term "logogram", from the Greek for "word-character". The correspondence between logograms and words isn't simple; while some logograms may be pictograms or ideograms, others may be chosen for the sound of a word already associated with the character, and the characters can be combined in various ways. That's why the term "logographic" fits better than other terms.
End of pedantic lecture.  |
Well, if you want to get
really pedantic, in Japanese, kanji do not always represent a word
or specific sound, so "logogram" is not accurate, either. Further, since not all kanji represent an idea, "ideogram" is not correct, either.
"Morphograph" is better.
Now it's someone else's turn to out-pedant me!