Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

In article <e8k2mt$de0$02$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mok-Kong Shen
<mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

Concerning (2), I suppose one may well consider The
Oxford English Dictionary (the biggest English
dictionary I ever know, having 20 volumes) to be a
sufficiently good Dictionary. On p.621 of its vol.VII
(2nd ed.) I found:

ideograph: A character or figure symbolizing the
idea or thing, without expressing the name of it,
as the Chinese characters and most Egyptian
hieroglyphics.

The OED is painfully wrong - not just about Chinese, but also Egyptian.
Hasn't the contributor for that entry heard about Champollion? How does
he/she think that hieroglyphs were deciphered?

In H. Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and
Linguistics (London and New York, 1996, ISBN 0-415-02225-8)
I found on p.73 (note the phrase "ideographic writing"):
Chinese

Largest Sino-Tibetan language, which is actually
a group of at least six languages: Mandarin (....
.... with 613 million speakers the most widely
spoken language in the world), Wu .......... The
beginnings of the ideographic writing system date
back 4,000 years; today it is the oldest writing
system in use.

Rather than relying on a passing comment in an entry on Sino-Tibetan,
why not try consulting a source that is actually about the Chinese
writing system? For example:
---
Many scholars, especially linguists and Sinologists, now agree that the
Chinese script may be described as an enormously large but phonetically
inprecise syllabary, with strong visual and semantic qualities...A few
philosophers still insist that the Chinese writing system is
pictographic and "ideographic"...but their views have been effectively
countered by empirical and historical evidence.
---
Victor Mair, "Modern Chinese Writing", in _The World's Writing
Systems_ (ed. Daniels and Bright)

See also chapters 7-9 in DeFrancis' _The Chinese Language_.


In W. Abraham, Terminologie zur neueren Linguistik
(Tuebingen, 1988, ISBN 3-484-10605-0) I found on p.284
(note "chinesisches Schreibsystem"):

Ideogramm, ideographisch

Begriffschrift, Darstellung der Woerter durch
Begriffszeichen: z.B. die aegyptischen Hieroglyphen
oder die chinesischen und japanischen Schreibsysteme.
Gegensatz: Buchstaben-, Silbenschrift.

First, why are you quoting a _German_ source about the use of technical
terms in _English_?
Second, if they are using "ideogramm" in the English sense, they are
again embarassingly wrong, for the same reasons the OED is.

[...]

rlt
.

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