How are there people not uneducated but with so little understanding of language change?
To use your example, “dog” used to be a term for a specific subset of dogs (don’t ask me to define it, I’m into etymology, not dogs) and the generic term was “hound” which now refers to a different subset of dogs (hunting dogs from my understanding). So every English speaker today is ignorant? Or are you?
I’m saying it’s the developmental linguistic phenomenon of overgeneralization. Like when a kid calls every animal “doggy”. This isn’t about etymology. It’s about using the Japanese word for something that has no relationship with Japanese. Just because it’s a logograph doesn’t make it kanji, or hanzi for that matter - but hanzi still would be a more appropriate name, since that’s at least what those words in various languages are referring to.
Why do you call it overgeneralization? It’s a generalization or widening of meaning. And it’s the same process that gave us the modern meaning of “dog” (as already explained). How is this not etymology? A word has a meaning (kanjis are logographs inside an otherwise syllable script) and widens it’s meaning (the rest can also be an alphabetic script). It is closer to kanji than to Chinese hanzi because it’s a logograph inside an otherwise non logographic script.
How are there people not uneducated but with so little understanding of language change?
To use your example, “dog” used to be a term for a specific subset of dogs (don’t ask me to define it, I’m into etymology, not dogs) and the generic term was “hound” which now refers to a different subset of dogs (hunting dogs from my understanding). So every English speaker today is ignorant? Or are you?
I’m saying it’s the developmental linguistic phenomenon of overgeneralization. Like when a kid calls every animal “doggy”. This isn’t about etymology. It’s about using the Japanese word for something that has no relationship with Japanese. Just because it’s a logograph doesn’t make it kanji, or hanzi for that matter - but hanzi still would be a more appropriate name, since that’s at least what those words in various languages are referring to.
Why do you call it overgeneralization? It’s a generalization or widening of meaning. And it’s the same process that gave us the modern meaning of “dog” (as already explained). How is this not etymology? A word has a meaning (kanjis are logographs inside an otherwise syllable script) and widens it’s meaning (the rest can also be an alphabetic script). It is closer to kanji than to Chinese hanzi because it’s a logograph inside an otherwise non logographic script.