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 yǔ 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

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 Vietnamese (now obsolete)
- 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

Chinese 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.

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. 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 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. 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.

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.

Advantages and disadvantages

Compared to alphabetical systems, logographies have the disadvantage of one needing to learn, remember and handle many more glyphs. 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 can to a limited extent in writing, even if they don't write in standard Chinese.

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"

"尾翼穩定脫殼穿甲彈"

"装弾筒付翼安定徹甲弾"

And the weapon:

"smoothbore gun"

"滑膛炮"

"滑腔砲"

And also terms like:

"Soviet-Sino Conflict"

"中蘇對立"

"中ソ対立"

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"

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)

"联合国"

Or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation:

"NATO"

"北約" (from Chinese 北大西洋公約組織. 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 mediums, such as newspapers (particularly headlines), and users of mobile phone web browsers and similar devices which display information of small screens. Entering data on those devices, however, may be exceedingly difficult due to the very large number of glyphs in the language and very limited number of buttons.

Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, much more memory is needed to store a character of that type than a Roman character for example.

Because recognition of characters is of reasonable ease (comparable to short English words of similar size, such as 'cat', 'dog' or 'cake') once the system is learned, and as stated above sentences are relatively short, a logogram-based system allows for faster reading times overall.

External links

A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective

References

- Chapter 3.

Writing systems | Graphemes | Logographic writing systems