Why does Unicode use the term “ideograph” when it is linguistically incorrect?
The characters used to write Chinese are traditionally called “Chinese characters” in the various East Asian languages (hanzi in Mandarin, kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean). In English, they are generally referred to by names such as “ideograph” or “pictogram,” even though these don’t accurately reflect what the characters are or how they are used. Indeed, no single linguistic term adequately describes these characters because they have such varied origins and uses. The only possible exception would be “sinogram,” which is Latin for “Chinese character” and rarely found. Unicode originally adopted the word “ideograph” as representing common English usage. The term is now so pervasive in the standard that it cannot be abandoned.
