Logograms are symbols representing a word or meaningful unit of speech, used in ancient writing systems worldwide. They can be pictograms or ideograms and may become stylized over time. Logogrammatic systems often use phonetic elements to supplement logograms, as full expression requires a phonetic component. No purely logogrammatic writing systems are in use today.
Logograms are symbols used in written language that represent an entire word or morpheme, a meaningful unit of speech. Examples of logograms in English are numbers and symbols such as # (pound or number) and % (percentage). Many of the world’s earliest writing systems, such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, used logograms. Logograms have a history of use around the world, from Asia and the Middle East to Africa and the Americas. While many modern writing systems use logograms to some extent, no purely logogrammatic writing systems are in use today.
Logograms are characterized by being unrelated to the pronunciation of the word they represent; they cannot be fathomed, as words written with an alphabet can be. For this reason, the same logograms can be used in many languages, as is the case with numerals used in English. Logograms are sometimes pictograms, visually related to the word or morpheme they represent, and sometimes ideograms, representing more abstract ideas.
As logogrammatic writing systems evolve, logograms often become so reduced or stylized that their meaning is no longer immediately apparent from their appearance. This is the case with writing systems such as cuneiform and Chinese. The Roman letters used for English and most other European languages are also derived from ancient pictographs representing example words starting with each letter.
Logogrammatic writing systems also increasingly use phonetic elements as they evolve to handle new linguistic situations. For example, many logogrammatic systems of the ancient world, such as the Maya and Aztec glyphs, used phonetic symbols to supplement the logograms when the logograms themselves were not sufficient for expression. In fact, a writing system must have a phonetic component to be complete; full expression is simply not possible otherwise. The latter situation was the case with the ancient Nahuatl writing system, which served more as an outline of a text than as a record of specific words; Different people reading the same ancient Aztec text aloud could theoretically use very different words. Full logogrammatic writing systems can use logograms to represent phonemes (sounds), as in the writing system that evolved into the Roman alphabet, or they can combine phonetic symbols with semantic ones, as in Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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