Logogram
Encyclopedia
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme
(the smallest meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to phonograms
, which represent phoneme
s (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinative
s, which mark semantic categories
.
Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however, ideogram
s represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.
Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phoneme
s that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms, while it might be relatively harder to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words. 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 alphabet
s, abjad
s, abugida
s, syllabaries
and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.
Logographic systems, or logographies, include the earliest true writing systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing.
A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and none is known apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki Pona
, a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes. A more recent attempt is Zlango
, intended for use in text messaging
, currently including around 300 "icons". All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus
principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinative
s; such "radical
and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple rebuses to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.
Logographic writing systems include:
None of these systems is purely logographic. This can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes: some morphemes are composed of more than one character. For example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū (literally "know cinnabar") with the 'bug' determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately (except to stand in for 蜘蛛 in poetry). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king (coincidentally also written 王) and a suffix pronounced s. (The suffix is preserved in the modern falling tone.) In modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār "flower (diminutive)".
A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts
(developed from the Aramaic
abjad
) used to write Middle Persian
during much of the Sassanid period
; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic
but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination "M-L-K" would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn
, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant
of the Arabic alphabet
.
Logograms are used in modern shorthand
to represent common words. In addition, the numerals
and mathematical symbols used in alphabetic systems are logograms—1 one, 2 two, + plus, = 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.
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 logographically. Many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese.
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. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.
The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only 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.
The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese
, post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese
, which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruent
s, and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants); the Old Chinese
difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization
or pharyngealization); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruent
s and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese
times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than the tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound.
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. As an example, based on 每 "each", pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin
, are the characters 侮 "to humiliate", 悔 "to regret" and 海 "sea", pronounced wǔ, huǐ and hǎi respectively in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese
– /mˤəʔ/(每) /m̥ˤəʔ/(悔) /m̥ˤəʔ/(海) according to a recent reconstruction by William Baxter
– but sound change
s in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations.
and hanja
, respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture.
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 sometimes described as morphographic writing systems.
Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but can to a significant extent in writing even if they don't write in standard Chinese
. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan prior to modern times, communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy.
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 but due to its unique history of development, Japanese
has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. 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
, Spanish
and Finnish
make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Both English
and French orthography
are more complicated than that and character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. 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. The latter is now rarely used in Korea.
According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in PRC's "Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese
" (现代汉语常用字表) cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters
" (常用國字標準字體表) by the Ministry of Education of ROC, while 4,759 in the "Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu" (常用字字形表) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combination of two or more already-learned characters.
s 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. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. 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 requires only one byte
for each grapheme, while the Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8
requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word
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 encoding
s 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.
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
(the smallest meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to phonograms
Phonogram (linguistics)
A phonogram is a grapheme which represents a phoneme or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or the Japanese kana...
, which represent phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinative
Determinative
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and...
s, which mark semantic categories
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
.
Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however, ideogram
Ideogram
An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.
Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms, while it might be relatively harder to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words. 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 alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
s, abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
s, abugida
Abugida
An abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
s, syllabaries
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...
and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.
Logographic systems
A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and none is known apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki Pona
Toki Pona
Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto....
, a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes. A more recent attempt is Zlango
Zlango
Zlango is an icon-based "language" built for web and mobile messaging. Zlango Ltd., the Israeli company which created and owns Zlango, has released a Java and Brew application for mobile phones which uses the Zlango icon language to create a new form of SMS, called ZMS, using Zlango's icons...
, intended for use in text messaging
Text messaging
Text messaging, or texting, refers to the exchange of brief written text messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network...
, currently including around 300 "icons". All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus
Rebus
A rebus is an allusional device that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames, for example in its basic form 3 salmon fish to denote the name "Salmon"...
principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinative
Determinative
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and...
s; such "radical
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...
and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple rebuses to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.
Logographic writing systems include:
- Logoconsonantal scripts
- These are scripts in which the graphemes may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian
G38 was used to write both "duck" and "son", though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are, - *HieroglyphsEgyptian hieroglyphsEgyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
, hieraticHieraticHieratic refers to a cursive writing system that was used in the provenance of the pharaohs in Egypt and Nubia that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, to which it is intimately related...
, and demoticDemotic (Egyptian)Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
: Ancient EgyptAncient EgyptAncient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
- These are scripts in which the graphemes may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian
- Logosyllabic scripts
- These are scripts in which the graphemes represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include,
- *Anatolian hieroglyphs: LuwianLuwian languageLuwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria...
- *CuneiformCuneiform scriptCuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
: SumerianSumerian languageSumerian is the language of ancient Sumer, which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism...
, AkkadianAkkadian languageAkkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
, other Semitic languagesSemitic languagesThe Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
, ElamiteElamite languageElamite is an extinct language spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was the primary language in present day Iran from 2800–550 BCE. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great....
, HittiteHittite languageHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
, LuwianLuwian languageLuwian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria...
, HurrianHurrian languageHurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians , a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in...
, and UrartianUrartian languageUrartian, Vannic, and Chaldean are conventional names for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Eastern Anatolia region of... - *Dongba scriptDongba scriptThe Dongba, Tomba or Tompa symbols are a system of pictographic glyphs used by the ²dto¹mba of the Naxi people in southern China. In the Naxi language it is called ²ss ³dgyu 'wood records' or ²lv ³dgyu 'stone records'. They are perhaps a thousand years old. The glyphs may be used as rebuses for...
written with Geba scriptGeba scriptGeba is a syllabic script for the Naxi language. It is called ¹Ggo¹baw in Naxi, adapted as Geba, 哥巴, in Chinese. Some glyphs resemble the Yi script, and some appear to be adaptations of Chinese characters. Geba is only used to transcribe mantras, and there are few texts, though it is sometimes used...
: Naxi languageNaxi languageNaxi is a Tibeto-Burman language or group of languages spoken by some 310,000 people concentrated in the Lijiang City Yulong Naxi Autonomous County of the province of Yunnan, China. Nakhi is also the name of the ethnic group that speaks it.- Classification :There are at least two Naxi languages...
(Dongba itself is pictographicPictogramA pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
) - *Tangut scriptTangut scriptThe Tangut script was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia Dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants...
: Tangut languageTangut languageTangut is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Western Xia Dynasty, also known as the Tangut Empire. It is classified by some linguists as one of the Qiangic languages, which also include Qiang and rGyalrong, among others... - *Shui script: Shui language
- *Maya glyphsMaya scriptThe Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...
: Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languageClassic Maya languageThe Classic Maya language is the oldest historically attested member of the Mayan language family. It is the main language documented in the pre-Columbian inscriptions of the Classic Era Maya civilization.- Relationships :...
s - *Yi (classical): various Yi languageYi languageNuosu , also known as Northern Yi, Liangshan Yi, and Sichuan Yi, is the prestige language of the Yi people; it has been chosen by the Chinese government as the standard Yi language and, as such, is the only one taught in school, both in its oral and written form...
s - *Han charactersChinese characterChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
: Chinese languages, KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, VietnameseVietnamese languageVietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam... - *Derivatives of Han characters:
- **Chữ nôm: VietnamVietnamVietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
- **Geba scriptGeba scriptGeba is a syllabic script for the Naxi language. It is called ¹Ggo¹baw in Naxi, adapted as Geba, 哥巴, in Chinese. Some glyphs resemble the Yi script, and some appear to be adaptations of Chinese characters. Geba is only used to transcribe mantras, and there are few texts, though it is sometimes used...
: Naxi - **Jurchen scriptJurchen scriptJurchen script was the writing system used to write Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in the northeastern China of the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Chinese...
: JurchenJurchen languageJurchen language is an extinct language. It was spoken by Jurchen people of eastern Manchuria, the creators of the Jin Empire in the northeastern China of the 12th–13th centuries. It is classified as a Southwestern Tungusic language.-Writing:... - **Khitan large scriptKhitan large scriptThe Khitan large script was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language. It was used during the 10th-12th centuries by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in north-eastern China. In addition to the large script, the Khitans simultaneously also used a...
: KhitanKhitan languageThe Khitan language is a now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people . Khitan is generally deemed to be genetically linked to the Mongolic languages. It was written using two mutually exclusive writing systems known as the Khitan large script and the Khitan small script... - **SawndipZhuang logogramZhuang characters or Sawndip are logograms derived from Han characters and used by the Zhuang people of Guangxi, China to write the Zhuang languages. In Mandarin Chinese, these are called Gǔ Zhuàngzì or Fāngkuài Zhuàngzì .- History :...
: Zhuang languages
None of these systems is purely logographic. This can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes: some morphemes are composed of more than one character. For example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū (literally "know cinnabar") with the 'bug' determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately (except to stand in for 蜘蛛 in poetry). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king (coincidentally also written 王) and a suffix pronounced s. (The suffix is preserved in the modern falling tone.) In modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār "flower (diminutive)".
A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts
Pahlavi scripts
Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are*the use of a specific Aramaic-derived script, the Pahlavi script;...
(developed from the Aramaic
Aramaic alphabet
The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BC. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....
abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....
) used to write Middle Persian
Middle Persian
Middle Persian , indigenously known as "Pârsig" sometimes referred to as Pahlavi or Pehlevi, is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as a...
during much of the Sassanid period
Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire , known to its inhabitants as Ērānshahr and Ērān in Middle Persian and resulting in the New Persian terms Iranshahr and Iran , was the last pre-Islamic Persian Empire, ruled by the Sasanian Dynasty from 224 to 651...
; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic
Aramaic language
Aramaic is a group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic language phylum. The name of the language is based on the name of Aram, an ancient region in central Syria. Within this family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic family, and more specifically, is a part of the Northwest Semitic subfamily,...
but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination "M-L-K" would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn
Frahang-i Pahlavig
Frahang-i Pahlavig is a dictionary of Aramaic language ideograms with Middle Persian translations and transliterations...
, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant
Perso-Arabic script
The Persian or Perso-Arabic alphabet is a writing system based on the Arabic script. Originally used exclusively for the Arabic language, the Arabic alphabet was adapted to the Persian language, adding four letters: , , , and . Many languages which use the Perso-Arabic script add other letters...
of the Arabic alphabet
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...
.
Logograms are used in modern shorthand
Shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...
to represent common words. In addition, the numerals
Numeral system
A numeral system is a writing system for expressing numbers, that is a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using graphemes or symbols in a consistent manner....
and mathematical symbols used in alphabetic systems are logograms—1 one, 2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand
Ampersand
An ampersand is a logogram representing the conjunction word "and". The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for "and".-Etymology:...
& is used for and and et (such as &c for et cetera
Et cetera
Et cetera is a Latin expression that means "and other things", or "and so forth". It is taken directly from the Latin expression which literally means "and the rest " and is a loan-translation of the Greek "καὶ τὰ ἕτερα"...
), % for percent, $ for dollar, # for number, € for euro, £ for pound, etc.
Semantic and phonetic dimensions
All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language.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 logographically. Many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese.
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. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.
Chinese characters
Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology.The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only 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.
- The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictogramPictogramA pictograph, also called pictogram or pictogramme is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance.Pictography is a...
s, which are pictorial representations of the morphemeMorphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
represented, e.g. 山 for "mountain". - The second type are ideogramIdeogramAn ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.Examples of...
s that attempt to visualize abstract concepts, such as 上 "up" and 下 "down". Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, 刀 is a pictogram meaning "knife", while 刃 is an ideogram meaning "blade". - Radical-radical compounds in which each element of the character (called radicalRadical (Chinese character)A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...
) 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. - 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 around 90% of Chinese logograms.
- Changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographicOrthographyThe orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and often semanticSemanticsSemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
drift. For instance, 樂 can mean both "music"(pinyin: yuè ) and "pleasure" (pinyin: lè). - 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 kanaKanaKana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
can be considered to be of this character, hence the name kana (仮名; 仮 is a simplified form of 假 but used in Korea and Japan).
The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
, post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
, which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruent
Obstruent
An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract, such as [k], [d͡ʒ] and [f]. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants....
s, and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants); the Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
or pharyngealization); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruent
Obstruent
An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract, such as [k], [d͡ʒ] and [f]. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants....
s and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than the tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound.
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. As an example, based on 每 "each", pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin
Standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
, are the characters 侮 "to humiliate", 悔 "to regret" and 海 "sea", pronounced wǔ, huǐ and hǎi respectively in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
– /mˤəʔ/(每) /m̥ˤəʔ/(悔) /m̥ˤəʔ/(海) according to a recent reconstruction by William Baxter
William H. Baxter
William H. Baxter is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan. His specialty is the historical study of the Chinese language. He earned his Ph.D...
– but sound change
Sound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
s in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations.
Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean
Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi) by 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 kanjiKanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
and hanja
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
, respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture.
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 sometimes described as morphographic writing systems.
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 significant extent in writing even if they don't write in standard Chinese
Vernacular Chinese
Written Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan prior to modern times, communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy.
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 but due to its unique history of development, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. 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
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Both English
English orthography
English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of habits to represent speech sounds in writing. In most other languages, these habits are regular enough so that they may be called rules...
and French orthography
French orthography
French orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the French language. It is based on a combination of phonemic and historical principles. The spelling of words is largely based on the pronunciation of Old French c. 1100–1200 CE and has stayed more or less the same since then, despite...
are more complicated than that and character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
, the Korean language
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
writing system, is an example of an alphabet that was designed to replace the logogrammic hanja
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used in Korea.
According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in PRC's "Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese
Xiandai Hanyu changyong zibiao
The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese is a list of 7,000 commonly used Simplified Chinese characters in Chinese. It was created in 1988 in the People's Republic of China.It is comparable to the Standard Form of National Characters in Taiwan....
" (现代汉语常用字表) cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters
Xiandai Hanyu changyong zibiao
The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese is a list of 7,000 commonly used Simplified Chinese characters in Chinese. It was created in 1988 in the People's Republic of China.It is comparable to the Standard Form of National Characters in Taiwan....
" (常用國字標準字體表) by the Ministry of Education of ROC, while 4,759 in the "Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu" (常用字字形表) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combination of two or more already-learned characters.
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 methodInput method
An input method is an operating system component or program that allows any data, such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements, to be received as input. In this way users can enter characters and symbols not found on their input devices...
s for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie or Wubi method
Wubi method
The Wubizixing input method , often abbreviated to simply Wubi or Wubi Xing, is a Chinese character input method primarily for inputting simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese text on a computer...
of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo
Bopomofo
Zhuyin fuhao , often abbreviated as zhuyin and colloquially called bopomofo, was introduced in the 1910s as the first official phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin....
or Pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. 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 requires only one byte
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...
for each grapheme, while the Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word
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 encoding
Variable-width encoding
A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set for representation in a computer...
s allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
to use only the bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that follows merging large character sets with smaller ones.