http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0824826566/omniglot-20
Whether one is interested in Chinese characters from the standpoint of language, literature, semiotics, psychology, history, cultural studies, or computers, Ideogram contains new ideas and insights that are sure to challenge preconceptions and provoke thought.
By S Hudson on 2012
Warning: don't buy this book unless you're interested in academic blather. You'll just be wasting your money and time. The main reason I dislike this book is that with a great deal of self-righteous acrimony, it attacks a straw man conception of ideograms as a means of conveying "disembodied" Platonic ideas independently of language. I don't believe that anybody to speak of takes this view. Plato's scheme of there being a realm of ideas -- with ideal forms that exist in a kind of heavenly true reality that individual things in this world only participate in and are shadows of (thus the metaphor of the cave) - is not taken seriously in the modern world. So I think Unger's argument is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous crap. Chinese characters are what they are, quite independently of his blather. No doubt he's right about some specifics - that many of them have a phonological element along with a significance element, and thus don't represent or symbolize ideas in a direct way. But some do depict ideas fairly directly. (That they would do so completely independently of words is an asinine straw man idea.) The crux of his argument seems to be that they are not special, that they don't do anything all that different from alphabetically written words. From experience, I beg to differ: something special and different comes into play with graphic depiction and combinations of elements. A special mental light and power is potentiated. Ideograms -- graphic depictions of not "disembodied," but word-based ideas - are not a myth, but exist, and have, I believe, many of the properties and potentials that he denies. I know this because I have spent thousands of fun hours creatively constructing an "ideographic" system for English, and it works!
