Logogram
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.
Logographs are commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however,
ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, so none of the logographic systems described here is truly ideographic.
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: for example, the logograph 雨 is used to represent the Mandarin Chinese word
y" and Japanese word
ame, which both mean "rain". 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.
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 logographics systems include:
*Consonant-based
**
Egyptian hieroglyphs "
Ancient Egypt*Syllable-based
**
Anatolian hieroglyphs "
Luwian**
Cuneiform "
Sumerian,
Akkadian, other
Semitic languages,
Elamite,
Hittite,
Luwian,
Hurrian, and
Urartian**
Chinese characters "
Chinese,
Japanese,
Korean, and old
Vietnamese**
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 —
ZhuangChinese characters as used in
Chinese are the only purely logographic system in use today; the
Japanese writing system combines Chinese logograms with
hiragana and
katakana, which are
syllabaries rather than logographic systems. Written
Korean used
a subset of Chinese characters as well until
Hangul, an
alphabetic system, became widespread after
World War II.
Vietnamese used both Chinese characters and a set of native logograms called
Chữ nôm, until French missionaries arrived in
Indochina and introduced a system based on the
Latin alphabet.
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.
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. Similarly, Japanese
kana developed from phonetic use of Chinese logographs, and are often used to disambiguate Chinese characters that may have several pronunciations by writing their grammatical
inflections. 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.
Chinese scholars have traditionally classified Chinese characters into six types by etymology.
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 |
#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". #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".#
Radical-radical compounds in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning.#
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. #
Changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through
orthographic and often
semantic drift. For instance, 考 (to test) and 老 (old) were once the same character, meaning "elder person".#
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.
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.
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.
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
Japanese and
Korean).
* 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 particularily 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.
* Logographs cannot be
inflected like words in alphabetic systems can. Languages which has 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
syllabaric system is needed anyway.
Advantages:
* The biggest advantage is that one does not necessarily need to know the spoken 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 can to a limited extent in writing, even if they don't write in
standard Chinese.
Mixed:
A logogram-based system uses fewer characters to express something compared to an alphabetic system. Compare the following title in English, Chinese and Japanese, respectively:
* "Return of the King"
* "王者歸來"
* "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:
* "armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot"
* "尾翼穩定脫殼穿"彈"
* "装弾'付翼安定徹"弾"
And the weapon:
* "smoothbore gun"
* "滑膛炮"
* "滑"砲"
And also terms like:
* "Soviet-Sino Conflict"
* "中蘇對立"
* "中ソ対立"
Note however, that the number of spoken syllables in either langue 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.
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'國聯盟"
This is particularly true of cases where English can express an idea in a word, such as:
* "Socialism"
* "社會主義"
or:
* "Secretary" (of organization)
* "秘書長"
* "書記長"
Moreover, alphabets have the advantage of being able to utilise 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)
* ""合国"
Or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation:
* "NATO"
* "北約" (From Chinese 北大西洋公約組". 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.
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 uses two bytes per character for all languages.
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.
*
Chinese character classification*
Ideogram*
A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective
*
* - Chapter 3.
