A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds. A grapheme designates the atomic unit in written language. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Writing Systems of the World today A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ... A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ...

Logographs are commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here is truly ideographic. A Chinese character. ...

Logographs are composed of visual elements arranged in a variety of ways, rather than using the segmental phoneme principle of construction used in alphabetic languages. As a result, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, although it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of ideographs. Another feature of logographs is that a single logograph 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. In human language, a phoneme is a set of phones (speech sounds or sign elements) that are cognitively equivalent. ... A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. ...

Logographic systems

Logographic 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 logographic writing. Examples of languages that have logographic systems include:

• partly Consonant-based
  • Egyptian hieroglyphs — Ancient Egypt
• partly Syllable-based
  • Anatolian hieroglyphs — Luwian
  • Cuneiform — Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian
  • Maya glyphs — Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages
  • Yi (classical) — various Yi languages
• Chinese-based systems
  • Chữ nôm — Vietnam
  • Geba — Naxi
  • Jurchen — Jurchen
  • Khitan large script — Khitan
  • Tangut — Tangut
  • Zhuang — Zhuang

There are no purely logographic language systems in existence today. A common myth is that Chinese is a logographic 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. Only the most basic monosyllabic words in Chinese could be considered logographic. Hieroglyphs are a system of writing used by the Ancient Egyptians, using a combination of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements. ... Khafres Pyramid (4th dynasty) and Great Sphinx of Giza (c. ... Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous hieroglyphic script native to western Anatolia first appears on Luwian royal seals, from ca. ... Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo European language family and has been preserved in three forms: (1) Cuneiform Luwian, (2) Hieroglyphic-Luwian and (3), the somewhat later Lycian. ...   The cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ... The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 1800 BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the first century AD... Akkadian (lišānum akkadÄ«tum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. ... 14th century BC diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Tell Amarna. ... Elamite is an extinct language, which was spoken in the ancient Elamite Empire. ... The Hittite language is the dead language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who once created an empire centered on ancient Hattusa (modern BoÄŸazköy) in north-central Anatolia (modern Turkey). ... Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo European language family and has been preserved in three forms: (1) Cuneiform Luwian, (2) Hieroglyphic-Luwian and (3), the somewhat later Lycian. ... Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites), 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... Urartian is the conventional name for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in Northeast Anatolia (present-day Turkey), in the region of Lake Van. ... Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico The Maya script, commonly known as Maya hieroglyphs, was the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. ... The Chorti language (Chorti) is a langauge of the Mayan language family. ... Yucatec Maya (or Yukatek in the revised orthography of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas, now preferred by scholars) is a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula, northern Belize and parts of Guatemala. ... The Classic Maya language is the oldest historically attested member of the Maya language family. ... The Yi scripts, also known as Cuan or Wei, are used to write the Yi languages. ... Yi (also Moso, Lolo, Noso, ) is a family of closely related Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Yi people. ... The characters for Chữ Nôm written in Khải thÆ° style. ... Categories: Ethnic groups of China ... Categories: Ethnic groups of China ... The Jurchens (Chinese: 女真, pinyin: nǚzhēn) were a Tungusic people who inhabited parts of Manchuria and northern Korea until the seventeenth century, when they became the Manchus. ... The Jurchens (Chinese: 女真, pinyin: nǚzhēn) were a Tungus people who inhabited parts of Manchuria and northern Korea until the seventeenth century, when they became the Manchus. ... The Khitan, in Chinese Qidan (契丹 Pinyin: Qìdān), were an ethnic group which dominated much of Manchuria and was classified in Chinese history as one of the Tungus ethnic groups (東胡族 dōng hú zú). They established the Liao dynasty in 907, which was then conquered in 1125 by the... The Khitan language is a now-extinct language once spoken by the Khitan people. ... The Tangut, also known as the Western Xia were a Qiangic-Tibetan people who moved to the highlands of western Sichuan sometime before the 10th century AD. They spoke Tangut language a now-extinct Tibeto-Burman language. ... Tangut (also Xixia) is the ancient northerneastern Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Tangut Empire. ... The Zhuang (Simplified Chinese: 壮族; Traditional Chinese: 壯族; Hanyu Pinyin: ; own name: BouчcueÅ‹ÑŒ/Bouxcuengh) are an ethnic group of people who mostly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. ... The Zhuang language (autonym: Cuengh or CueÅ‹ÑŒ; Chinese: 壮语; Hanyu Pinyin: ) is used by the Zhuang people in the Peoples Republic of China. ...

Logographs 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. Shorthand is an abbreviated, symbolic writing method that improves speed of writing or brevity as compared to a normal method of writing a language. ... A numeral is a symbol or group of symbols that represents a number. ... The roman ampersand at left is stylised, but the italic one at right reveals its origin in the Latin word An ampersand (&, &, &), also commonly called an and sign, is a logogram representing the conjunction and. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, which is Latin for and... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

Ideographic and phonetic dimensions

All full logographic 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 logographically. Many logographic systems also have an 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, 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. A Chinese character. ...

Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character classification

Chinese scholars have traditionally classified Chinese characters into six types by etymology. § There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形; xiàngxíng) and a number of indicatives (指事; zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono-semantic compounds (形聲; xíngshēng). ...

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

1. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms, which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented, e.g. 山 for "mountain".
2. The second type are ideograms that attempt to graphicalize 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".
3. Radical-radical compounds in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning.
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. For instance, 樂‘music’ is also read 樂‘pleasure’ .
6. Improvisational characters (lit. "improvised-borrowed-words") and 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).

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. 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. This is particularly true in non-Chinese languages, such as Japanese, that have also attached native readings to Chinese characters. An excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters. ... An excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters. ... Pictogram for public toilets A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing an object or concept by illustration. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... A Chinese character. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters σημαντικός or in latin letters semantikós, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Manyogana 万葉仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Rōmaji ローマ字 For other meanings of Kana, see Kana (disambiguation). ... Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Tone (linguistics). ... Old Chinese (formerly called Archaic Chinese) (Simplified Chinese: 上古汉语; Traditional Chinese: 上古漢語; pinyin: ), refers to the Chinese spoken during the Zhou Dynasty (10th century BC – 256 BC). ...

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. Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Manyogana Uses Furigana Okurigana Rōmaji Kanji (Japanese: ) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (平仮名), katakana (片仮名), and the arabic numerals. ... It has been suggested that Sino-Korean be merged into this article or section. ...

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.

Advantages and disadvantages

Disadvantages:

• Compared to alphabetical systems, logographies have the disadvantage of requiring the memorization of many more glyphs, and their respective pronunciations (which can be numerous in the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese).
• The pronunciation of a written word is not obvious unless you know all the logographs (but it can be guessed at). In Japanese this is particularly difficult as it has several possible pronunciations for almost every logogram.
• Conversely, the spelling of a word is not obvious from the pronunciation like it is in many alphabetical systems such as Italian and Finnish. (English is not a very good example on this point.) That is, unless you also know the meaning of the word and can guess which logographs it consists of. However, recent developments in word processing technology made it easier to pick the correct logogram.
• Logographs cannot be inflected like words in alphabetic systems can. Languages which have imported Chinese logograms, such as Japanese and Korean (which both inflect extensively) cannot accurately describe their languages with logograms alone, and a separate alphabetic or syllabic system is needed anyway.

Advantages: A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... English spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts. ... Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ... A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. ...

• The biggest advantage is that one does not necessarily need to know the spoken language of the writer in order 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 can to a limited extent in writing, even if they don't write in standard Chinese. Moreover, in the ancient orient (including Vietnam, Manchuria, Korea, Japan, etc), communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy. Deaf people also find logogram systems much easier to learn as the words are not related to sound, and it reduces the amount of words one must memorize to a tremendous degree.
• The meaning of words can be known directly. This significantly reduces the amount of effort required to advance from basic literacy to functional and academic literacy, despite the initial difficulty in becoming literate. Everyone who knows what the characters mean, can know what a new word means without explanation. This advantage become more pronounced as one advances in academia. In English, for example, more abstract words are constructed artificially from Greek or Latin words. These words are often unintelligible to most people outside of the speciality. For example, the word "logogram" is a combination of the Greek words 'logos' ("word" or "speech") and 'gram' (“something written” or “drawing”). In Chinese, it is written as 表語文字 (Word expressing letter) and anyone who is literate at a basic level can correctly guess the meaning. Once one learns the basic 2000-3000 letter/words out of the logograms, one immediately becomes functionally literate. And it take small effort to become academically literate at a highly advanced level. On the other hand, in Western languages, for example, there is no lowering of the learning curve for new terms and new vocabulary as they progress academically unless one has learned, or is learning, Greek or Latin. The use of logogram reduces the amount of words one must memorize as most can be read and written almost instinctively. This is cited as the primary reason for the close correspondence between the literacy rate and functional literacy rate in Japan and China.
• A logogram-based system uses fewer characters to express something compared to an alphabetic system. Compare the following title in English, Chinese(traditional/simplified) and Japanese, respectively:

• "Return of the King"
• "王者歸來"/"王者归来"
• "王の帰還"

Usually, the more complicated the idea being expressed, the more apparent this trend becomes; for example, the military term APFSDS and the translation in Chinese and Japanese: Vernacular Chinese (pinyin: báihuà; Wade-Giles: paihua) is a style or register of the written Chinese language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Standard Mandarin. ...

• "armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot"
• "尾翼穩定脫殼穿甲彈"/"尾翼稳定脱壳穿甲弹"
• "装弾筒付翼安定徹甲弾"

And the weapon:

• "smoothbore gun"
• "滑膛炮"/"滑膛炮"
• "滑腔砲"

And also terms like:

• "Soviet-Sino Conflict"
• "中蘇對立"/"中苏对立"
• "中ソ対立"

Note however, that the number of spoken syllables in either language is similar, and that the number of strokes needed to write the English version is significantly lower (21 versus 38 and 33 in the first example, and 53 versus 100 and 101 in the second example) which means that the logographic version can take significantly longer to write. This is less of a problem when typing on a computer. Stroke order refers to the way of writing Chinese characters. ...

On the other hand, for examples like the following, there's little advantage:

• "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics"
• "蘇維埃社會主義共和國聯盟"/"苏维埃社会主义共和国联盟"

This is particularly true of cases where English can express an idea in a word, such as:

• "Socialism"
• "社會主義"/"社会主义"

or:

• "Secretary" (of organization)
• "秘書長"/"秘书长"
• "書記長"

Moreover, alphabets have a slight advantage in utilizing acronyms, such as "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation" into "LASER". This is also possible to a lesser degree in logogram based languages. For example the United Nations:

• "UN"
• "国連" (from 国際連合)/"联合国"
• "联合国"

Or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization:

• "NATO"
• "北約"/"北约" (From Chinese 北大西洋公約組織. The Japanese name is 北大西洋条約機構)

One advantage of logograms in cases like the first example is that, while one who has not heard of the United Nations would have no clue as to what UN is, with logograms a moderately educated individual could easily decipher that this 国連 is something to do with "国 -> country" and "連 -> union", thus making the meaning more or less apparent. The second one, "北 -> north" and "約 -> promise/treaty" would however be confusing.

Shorter sentence lengths are beneficial to major communication media, such as newspapers (particularly headlines), and users of mobile phone web browsers and similar devices which display information on small screens. These devices typically have few buttons, but systems for breaking up Chinese characters into their constituent parts, as well as phonetic systems based on Bopomofo or Pinyin have been used to enter a single Chinese character with multiple keypresses. Zh yīn F o (注音符號), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) for the first four syllables of these Chinese phonetic symbols, is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (based on Taiwan... Pinyin is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin, where pin means spell and yin means sound. The most common variant of pinyin in use is called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: , Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: HànyÇ” PÄ«nyÄ«n), also known as scheme...

Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store a character of that type than a Latin-based character, although a word in Chinese is represented by one or two glyphs (two to four bytes in Unicode), compared to an average of five characters plus a space (six bytes in ASCII) in English (more in languages like Spanish and German). Unicode is increasingly being used even for English (as in the Java programming language) and depending on the encoding, it uses one or more bytes per character. Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by James Gosling and colleagues at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ... This page compares Unicode encodings. ...

Because character recognition is not difficult (comparable to short English words of similar size, such as 'cat', 'dog' or 'cake') once the system is learned, and sentences are relatively short, a logogram-based system allows for faster reading times overall.

See also

• Chinese character classification
• Hieroglyphs
• Ideogram
• Pictogram

§ There are several kinds of Chinese characters, including a handful of pictograms (象形; xiàngxíng) and a number of indicatives (指事; zhǐshì), but the vast majority are phono-semantic compounds (形聲; xíngshēng). ... Hieroglyphs or hieroglyphics can be Anatolian hieroglyphs (also known as Luwian hieroglyphs) Cretan hieroglyphs Mayan hieroglyphs (the best known of about half a dozen documented Mesoamerican writing systems) Mikmaq hieroglyphic writing colloquially, any handwritten characters which are difficult to read or decipher. ... A Chinese character. ... Pictogram for public toilets A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing an object or concept by illustration. ...

External links

• A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective

References

• 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.
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3690-4. - Chapter 3.