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Writing systems
History
Grapheme
List of writing systems
Types
Featural alphabet
Alphabet
Abjad
Abugida
Syllabary
Logography
Related
Pictogram
Ideogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). A writing system is a type of Symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in Language. The history of writing encompasses the various Writing systems that evolved in the Early Bronze Age (late 4th millennium BC) In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. This is a list of writing systems (or scripts) classified according to some common distinguishing features A featural alphabet is an Alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent An alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a Phoneme, a Spoken language, either An Abjad is a type of Writing system in which each symbol stands for a Consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate Vowel. An abugida ( from Ge‘ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida or Amharic አቡጊዳ ’abugida is a segmental Writing system which A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate Syllables which make up Words A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional A pictogram ( also spelled pictogramme) or pictograph is a Symbol representing a Concept, object, activity place or event An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea In Typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in written language. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories. A phonogram is a Grapheme (written character which represents a phoneme (speech sound or combination of phonemes such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an Ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in Logographic scripts Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from

Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms" or "hieroglyphics", which can also be called "hieroglyphs". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logogrammatical systems described here are truly ideographic. An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea

Logograms are composed of visual elements arranged in a variety of ways, rather than using the segmental phoneme principle of construction used in alphabetic languages. The phoneME project is Sun Microsystems reference implementation of Java virtual machine and associated libraries of Java ME with source licensed under the GNU As a result, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, while it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of ideographs. Another feature of logograms is that a single logogram may be used by a plurality of languages to represent words with similar meanings. While disparate languages may also use the same or similar alphabets, abjads, abugidas, syllabaries and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.

Contents

Logogrammatical systems

Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.
Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.

Logogrammatical systems are the earliest true writing systems; many of the first civilizations in the Near East, India, China, and Central America used some form of logogrammatical writing. Examples of languages that have logogrammatical systems include:

There are no purely logogrammatical language systems in existence today. Egyptian hieroglyphs (ˈhaɪərəʊɡlɪf from Greek grc-Grek ἱερογλύφος " sacred carving " also hieroglyphic = grc-Grek Ancient Egypt was an Ancient Civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous Logographic script native to central Anatolia, consisting of some 500 signs Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Sumerian ( " native tongue " was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC The Semitic languages are a Language family whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, Elamite is an Extinct language, which was spoken by the ancient Elamites. Hittite or Nesili is the Extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas (modern Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly Urartian (also called Vannic, in older literature also "Chaldean" is the conventional name for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom The Dongba, Tomba or Tompa script is a pictographic writing system used by the ²dto¹mba (Bon priests of the Naxi people. Naxi (also known as Nakhi, Nasi, Lomi, Moso, or Mo-su) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by some 300000 people mostly The Tangut script was an obsolete Logographic writing system used for writing the equally obsolete Tangut language in Western Xia Dynasty Tangut (also Xixia or Hsi-Hsia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken The Maya script, also known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the Pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently The Ch'orti' language (sometimes also Chorti) is a Mayan language, spoken by the indigenous Maya people who are also known as the Ch'orti' Yucatec Maya ("Maaya T'aan" in the revised Orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala) is a Mayan language spoken in The Classic Maya language is the oldest historically-attested member of the Mayan language family. The Yi scripts, also known as Cuan or Wei are used to write the Yi languages Classical Yi Logogram Yi (also Moso Lolo Noso etc) is a family of closely related tonal Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Yi people. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Chữ Nôm ( IPA: /cɨ3ˀ5 nom33/ chữ Nôm in Unicode: 字[[wikt 喃|喃]]/ 𡨸 喃/ 𡦂 喃 chữ Nôm in Unicode Vietnam (ˌviːɛtˈnɑːm Việt Nam) officially Geba is the syllabic component of the Naxi script. It is called ¹Ggo¹baw in Naxi, adapted as Geba in Chinese The Nakhi ( endonym ¹na²khi) are an ethnic group inhabiting the foothills of the Himalayas in the northwestern part of Yunnan Province The Jurchens ( were a Tungus people who inhabited the region of Manchuria ( Northeast China) until the 17th century when they adopted the name Manchu The Jurchens ( were a Tungus people who inhabited the region of Manchuria ( Northeast China) until the 17th century when they adopted the name Manchu Khitan script was the writing system of Khitan people. Afraid that the popularity of Chinese language and writing would blur their distinct identity the Khitan people The Khitan language (also known as Liao Kitan 639-3 is a now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people. Zhuang logograms or sawndip are Logograms created as a derivative characters of Han characters and used by Zhuang in Guangxi The Zhuang language ( autonym: Cuengh or Cueŋь) is used by the Zhuang people in the People's Republic of China. A common myth is that Chinese is a logogrammatical language. Though many characters have associated meanings, nearly all Chinese words involve combinations of characters. Only a small minority of words in Chinese involve single characters. Additionally, characters are made up of sub-character radicals that can also cue pronunciation and meaning. This disambiguation page differentiates the various historical uses of the term radical in the context of Chinese characters Only the most basic monosyllabic words in Chinese could be considered logogrammatical.

Logograms are used in modern shorthand systems in order to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in modern writing systems are also logograms — 1 stands for one, 2 for two, + for plus, = for equals and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et (such as &c for et cetera), % for percent, $ for dollar, # for number, € for euro, £ for pound, etc. An ampersand ( &) also commonly called an " 'and' sign," is a Logogram representing the conjunction "and" Et cetera (in English contexts pronounced) is a Latin expression that means "and other things" or "and so forth"

Ideographic and phonetic dimes and quarters

All full logogrammatical systems include a phonetic dimension (such as the "a" in the logogram @ at). In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logogrammatically. Many logogrammatical systems also have an ideographic component, called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea Typical Egyptian usage is to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinative to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a fixed combination of a radical that indicates its semantic category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation, although this has become somewhat opaque over the last three millennia. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.

Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character classification

Chinese scholars have traditionally classified Chinese characters into six types by etymology. All Chinese characters are Logograms but there are several derivative types

The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other Chinese characters. Although the perception of most Westerners is that most characters were derived in single-body fashion, pictograms and ideograms actually take up but a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i. e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up the same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves.

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters
Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters
  1. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms, which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented, e. A pictogram ( also spelled pictogramme) or pictograph is a Symbol representing a Concept, object, activity place or event In Morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. g. 山 for "mountain".
  2. The second type are ideograms that attempt to graphicalize abstract concepts, such as 上 "up" and 下 "down". An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek idea "idea" + grafo "to write" is a Graphic symbol that represents an Idea Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, 刀 is a pictogram meaning "knife", while 刃 is an ideogram meaning "blade".
  3. Radical-radical compounds in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning. For example, 休 "rest" is composed of the characters for "man" (人) and "tree" (木), with the intended idea of someone leaning against a tree, i. e. resting.
  4. Radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (Chinese: liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ("wood") its meaning of "supporting beam". Characters of this type constitute the majority of Chinese logograms.
  5. Changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographic and often semantic drift. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from For instance, 樂 can mean both "music" and "pleasure".
  6. Improvisational characters (lit. "improvised-borrowed-words") come into use when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and hence another character with the same or a similar sound (and often a close meaning) is "borrowed"; occasionally, the new meaning can supplant the old meaning. 自 used to be a pictographic word meaning "nose", but was borrowed to mean "self". It is now used almost exclusively to mean "self", while the "nose" meaning survives only in set-phrases and more archaic compounds. Because of their derivational process, the entire set of Japanese kana can be considered to be of this character, hence the name kana (仮名; 仮 is a simplified form of 假 but used in Japan only). Kana is a general term for the syllabic Japanese scripts Hiragana (ひらがな and Katakana (カタカナ as well as the old system

The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible because the phonetic system of Chinese allowed for generous homonymy, and because in consideration of phonetic similarity tone was generally ignored, as were the medial and final consonants of the characters in consideration, at least according to theory following from reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation. In linguistics a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same pronunciation but have different meanings and are usually spelled differently A tonal language is a language that uses tone to distinguish words Old Chinese ( or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty ( Chinese Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage.

Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean

Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however, the adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja, respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated

Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on the basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are often described as morphographic writing systems. A morphogram is the representation of a Morpheme by a Grapheme based solely on its meaning

Advantages and disadvantages

Separating writing and pronunciation

The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes aren't linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that one doesn't need to understand the pronunciation or language of the writer to understand it. The reader will recognise the meaning of 1, whether it is called one, ichi or wāḥid in the language of the writer. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but can to a limited extent, in writing even if they don't write in standard Chinese. Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the Written Chinese Language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Moreover, in East Asia (including China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, etc) prior to modern time, communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy. Deaf people also find logogram systems easier to learn as the words are not related to sound.

This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not an inherent feature of logograms, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek, Latin, Italian and Finnish make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a good one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside English orthography is more complicated than that and character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways. English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. Hangul, the Korean language writing system, is an example of an alphabet that was designed to replace the logogrammic hanja in order to increase literacy. This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated The latter is now rarely used in Korea.

Characters in information technology

Inputting complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to a practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie or Wubi method of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. A logogram, or logograph, is a Grapheme which represents a word or a Morpheme (a meaningful unit of language The Cangjie input method (often erroneously spelt “Changjie” or “Cang Jei” is a system by which Chinese characters may be entered into a Computer by means The Wubizixing input method ( often abbreviated to simply Wubi or Wubi Xing, is a Chinese character input method primarily for inputting simplified Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use While the former method is (linearly) faster, the learning curve is steeper. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered.

Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 contains only 256 graphemes and requires only one byte for each, while the Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit Character encodings for use by computers A byte (pronounced "bite" baɪt is the basic unit of measurement of information storage in Computer science. See also Mapping of Unicode characters The Unicode characters can be categorized in many different ways Unicode code points can be logically divided into 17 UTF-8 (8- Bit UCS / Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length Character encoding for Unicode. On the other hand, English words, for example, average on five characters and a space per word[1] and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only the bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that follows merging large character sets with smaller ones. A variable-width encoding is a type of Character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a Character set (a repertoire of symbols for In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's

References

  1. ^ Sentence and word length.

Dictionary

logogram

-noun

  1. a character or symbol that represents a word or phrase
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