Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Logogram
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 phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories. Logograms are often 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 are truly ideographic. Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phonemes that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, while it might be relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms. Another feature of logograms is that a single logogram may be used by a plurality of languages to represent words with similar meanings. While disparate languages may also use the same or similar alphabets, abjads, abugidas, syllabaries and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.
Logographic systems
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, which have their origins as Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional logograms. development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinatives; 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: 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 was used to write both s "duck" and s "son", though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are, *Hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic: Ancient Egypt 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: Luwian
Logogram *Cuneiform: Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian *Dongba script written with Geba script: Naxi language (Dongba itself is pictographic) *Tangut script: Tangut language *Shui script: Shui language *Maya glyphs: Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages *Yi (classical): various Yi languages *Han characters: Chinese languages, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese *Derivatives of Han characters: **Ch nm: Vietnam **Geba script: Naxi **Jurchen script: Jurchen **Khitan large script: Khitan **Sawndip: Zhuang 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, zhzh, was created by fusing the rebus zhzh (literally "know cinnabar") with the 'bug' determinative . Neither * zh nor * zh can be used separately (except to stand in for in poetry). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king (coincidentally also written ) 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 hur "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 hozwrishn, 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 logograms1 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.
Logogram
Chinese characters
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. "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. 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. for "mountain". 2. The second type are ideograms that attempt to visualize abstract concepts, such as "up" and "down". Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, is a pictogram meaning "knife", while is an ideogram meaning "blade". 3. Radical-radical compounds in which each element of the character (called radical) hints at the meaning. For example, "rest" is composed of the characters for "man" () and "tree" (), with the intended idea of someone leaning against a tree, i.e. resting. 4. Radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is (Chinese: ling), where the phonetic ling indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical ("wood") its meaning of "supporting beam". Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.[3]
5. Changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographic and often semantic drift. For instance, can mean both "music"(pinyin: yu ) and "pleasure" (pinyin: l). 6. Improvisational characters (lit. "improvised-borrowed-words") come into use when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and hence another character with the same or a similar sound (and often a close meaning) is "borrowed"; occasionally, the new meaning can supplant the old meaning. 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 (; is a simplified form of 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, post-final ending consonants /s/ and // 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 obstruents, 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 obstruents 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.
Logogram 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 "each", pronounced mi in Standard Mandarin, are the characters "to humiliate", "to regret" and "sea", pronounced w, hu and hi respectively in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese /m/() /m/() /m/() according to a recent reconstruction by William Baxter[4] but sound changes 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.
Logogram
References
[1] Most have glyphs with predominantly syllabic values, called logosyllabic, though Egyptian had predominantly consonantal or poly-consonantal values, and is thus called logoconsonantal. [2] "Determinative" is the more generic term, however, and some authors use it for Chinese as well (e.g. William Boltz in Daniels and Bright, 1996:194). [3] Li, Y., Kang, J.S., 1993. "Analysis of phonetics of the ideophonetic characters in modern Chinese". In: Chen, Y. (Ed.), Information Analysis of Usage of Characters in Modern Chinese. Shanghai Education Publisher, Shanghai, pp. 8498. (Chinese) [4] (http:/ / lodel. ehess. fr/ crlao/ document. php?id=1217), accessed April 22, 2011 [5] "Sentence and word length" (http:/ / hearle. nahoo. net/ Academic/ Maths/ Sentence. html). . Retrieved 2007-05-27.
DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN0-8248-1068-6. Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN0-8248-1892-X. Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN0-8147-3690-4., Chapter 3. Williams and Bright, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford, 1996.
External links
(http://iea.cass.cn/mzwz/charlist.htm) - Ancient Writing Library (http://www.for.aichi-pu.ac.jp/museum/) Chinese Script and Language (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm#characters)
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported http:/ / creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3. 0/