CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Ideographs

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As you can clearly see from Table 2-26, there is quite a wide variety of character set stan-

dards available that include ideographs. Chapter 3 will make sense of all these character

set standards.

A noteworthy characteristic of ideographs is that they can be quite complex. Believe it or

not, they can get much more complex than the sets of 94 or 256 characters just illustrated!

Ideographs are composed of radicals and radical-like elements, which can be thought of

as building blocks of sorts. Radicals are discussed later in this chapter, in the section “e

Structure of Ideographs.”

Ideograph Readings

In Japanese, the typical ideograph has at least two readings, and some have more. A read-

ing is simply the pronunciation of a character. For example, the ideograph , whose

meaning relates to “life,” has over 200 readings in Japanese—most of which are used for

Japanese given names, which are known for their unusual readings.

Ideograph readings typically come from two sources:

Language-specic reading•

Borrowed—and usually approximated—reading•

e native Japanese reading was how the Japanese pronounced a word before the Chinese

inuenced their language and writing system. e native Japanese reading is called the

Kun reading ( kun yomi).

e borrowed Chinese reading is the Japanese-language approximation of the original

Chinese reading of an ideograph. ese borro ...