{"id":326,"date":"2006-03-10T21:45:11","date_gmt":"2006-03-10T13:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/pigpen-principles\/"},"modified":"2018-08-21T17:42:51","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T09:42:51","slug":"pigpen-principles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/pigpen-principles\/","title":{"rendered":"pigpen principles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newspapers and magazines have so much misinformation about Chinese characters that I seldom bother to mention specific instances. But I expect better than this from the New York Times<\/em>, even though this is but soft news:<\/p>\n

\n

The two designers chose 20 stellar examples of a concept defined by the Japanese ideogram katei. It is the joining of two symbols — ka being house and tei being garden — that defines home in Japanese.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oy. First, katei<\/em> is not written with one “ideogram<\/a>” [sic] but two<\/em> Chinese characters \/ kanji:<\/p>\n

家庭<\/span><\/div>\n

(Somebody help me out if I got that wrong. I don’t know Japanese.) In Mandarin this is jiātíng<\/span>, meaning “family.” Nishikawa Yūko<\/span> has a long discussion about notions of katei<\/em> in “The Modern Japanese Family System: unique or universal?” (Multicultural Japan. Palaeolithic to Postmodern<\/em>. Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds. Cambridge University Press, pp. 224-232).<\/p>\n

Second, Chinese characters \/ kanji do not represent an ideographic form of writing<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Third, the Japanese language is not defined by symbols. Language comes first, writing later.<\/p>\n

Fourth, calling Chinese characters “symbols” is at best problematic; this is part of what feeds the ideographic myth. (See the second point.)<\/p>\n

I’m all for good design, but it shouldn’t be explained in terms of myths. Otherwise, perhaps architects and interior designers should be putting functioning pigpens inside houses, or at least a little covered shrine to a pig. After all, if we’re going to be guided by how characters look, is not the very essence of “home” (家) in Japan and China defined by having a pig (豕) under a roof (宀)?<\/p>\n

source: Homes and Gardens, Living in Harmony<\/a>, New York Times<\/em>, March 9, 2006<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newspapers and magazines have so much misinformation about Chinese characters that I seldom bother to mention specific instances. But I expect better than this from the New York Times, even though this is but soft news: The two designers chose … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,29,13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-characters","category-japanese","category-kanji","category-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7744,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/7744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}