Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Lee Sau Dan wrote:

>> I agree on that. Actually, I've asked PTD to give a
>> "reasonable" definition for the word "ideograph". He defines
>> it in a way such that ideographs are completely impossible by
>> definition. I just can't understand why he would find such a
>> definition useful.

António> Wought?

António> '1', '2', '3', '+', are ideographs.

No, they map to words. :)

Call me nuts, but I seldom map them to any words when doing math.
Anyhow, an ideogram may map to a word (along with others) when 'mapping'
is transitive.

António> A traffic sign is an ideograph.

Those are usually pictograms, and are not always clear in meaning.

Please explain what you mean.

António> If an ideograph is used inside some text to represent a
António> word, it's being used as a logograph. As in _the '90s_,
António> which accordingly have to take a plural marker.

What about using the character for "sun" to indicate the sun? Is it a
logograph or ideograph?

Ideographical use of a logogram.

And what if a Japanese student (being a native speaker of Chinese)
writes this character in a text message, even if he doesn't know whether
that should be pronounced as (and hences mapped to words) <nichi>, <ni*> or <hi>? (* means a short
vowel here, as <ni*> in <nippon>) In this case, is he using the
character to convey the meaning (i.e. the sun), or a word (he doesn't
know whether it's <ni*> (Sino-Japanese) or <hi> (native Japanese) in
that context).

In this case, the student is taking advantage of homography to mask
ignorance.

António> I don't understand why this is so difficult to grasp.

Because it's unclear. The way the characters are used in Japanese is
complicated. A kanji doesn't always map to a single word. It often
maps to a set of words (some being native Japanese, some being
Sino-Japanese) having the same meaning. Another example is the
character <yu4> (Pinyin, meaning "imperial" in Chinese). In Japanese,
it can be either <go> or <o>, and is used as a prefix to generate a
honorific form of a noun.

Very good, but the written text will have well-defined set of readings
(usually only one, but sometimes more due to no language being
phonetically injective). Compare that to <1 + 2 = 3>, which have no
reading in particular.

You may point out that one might devise an ideographical system from the
chinese characters. Make them independent of the specifics of the
language, find the general idea to be conveyed by each one, and ditch
the ones that don't fit. Set a given notation for composition and
arrangement.
But then you won't be writing chinese anymore.
--
am

laurus : rhodophyta : brezoneg : smalltalk : stargate
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