The image was created by Taku. ...

A Chinese logogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character which represents a word or a In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. ...morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other The orthography of a language is the set of rules of how to write correctly in the writing system of a language. ...orthography, such as A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. ...syllabaries, An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ...abjads, and An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ...alphabets, where each symbol primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.

Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...Chinese characters, used in The Chinese written language consists of a writing system stretching back nearly 4000 years. ...Chinese and Nihongo in kanji This article describes the modern Japanese writing system and its history. ...Japanese, make up a logographic system. Written The Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both North and South Korea. ...Korean used Hanja (lit. ...a subset of Chinese characters as well until widespread use of Hangul is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language (as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China). ...Hangul after Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (60,000 ft) into the air. ...World War II, as did Vietnamese (tiếng Việt, less commonly tiếng Việt Nam or Việt ngữ), formerly known as Annamite, is the national and official language of Vietnam (Việt Nam). ...Vietnamese before French missionaries arrived in Indochina, or French Indochina, was a federation of French colonies and protectorates in south_east Asia, part of the French colonial empire. ...Indochina.

A good example of modern Western logograms is the numbers _ 1 stands for one, 2 for two and so on; the The roman ampersand on the left is stylised, but the italic one on the right is clearly similar to et. An ampersand (&) is a logogram representing the word and. ...ampersand & is used for and, while Not to be confused with commercial art. ...@ sometimes stands for at.

Compared to An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ...alphabetical systems, logograms have a disadvantage in that one needs many of them to be able to write down a large number of words. An advantage is that one does not necessarily need to know the language of the writer to understand them _ everyone understands what 1 means, whether they call it one, eins, uno or ichi. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but often can in writing, especially if they write in standard written Chinese. In addition, a logogram-based system uses fewer characters to express something than an alphabetic system, a benefit enjoyed by Chinese and to some extent Japanese users of Cellular redirects here. ...mobile phone web browsers and other devices which display information on a small screen.

See also

• There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形; xiángxìng) and a number of ideograms (指示; zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono_semantic compounds (形聲; xíngshēng). ...Chinese character classification
• A Chinese character. ...Ideogram

External link

• A Typographic Outcry (http://www.landlubber.com/dec01/outcry.html): a curious perspective

References

• John DeFrancis is a Chinese language professor emeritus and researcher at the University of Hawaii who wrote a number of Chinese instructional texts (in particular, his Readers series is exceptional) in the 60s and 70s. ...DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0_8248_1068_6.
• Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0_8248_1892_X.