Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character 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 primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.
In stenography, a logograph or logogram is a single character which represents a word.
Chinese characters, used in Chinese and Japanese, make up a logographic system. Written Korean used a subset of Chinese characters as well until widespread use of Hangul after World War II, as did Vietnamese before French missionaries arrived in Indochina. Other logographic systems are Egyptian hieroglyphs, Cuneiform, and Mayan glyphs. (See the List of writing systems.)
In all modern writing systems, the numerals and mathematical symbols are logograms - 1 stands for one, 2 for two, + for plus, and so on. In English, the Ampersand & is used for and and et (such as &c for et cetera), % for percent, $ for dollar, # for both number and pound, etc.
However, no writing system is purely logographic. All full logographic systems include a phonetic dimension (such as the "a" in the logogram @ at), and this is usually syllabic. 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. Indeed, this is how Japanese Kana developed. Many logographic systems also have an ideographic component, called "determiners" 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 pronuncations, with a determiner 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 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. In Japanese, each borrowed Chinese character may have several pronunciations, which are often disambiguated by writing their grammatical inflections phonetically. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, but lacked ideograms.
Compared to Alphabetical systems, logographies have the disadvantage of one needing to learn and remember 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 some extent in writing, even if they don't write in standard Chinese.
In addition, 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"
"王者再臨"
"王の帰還"
Usually, the more complicated the idea being expressed, the more apparent this trend becomes; for excample, the military term APFSDS and and the Japanese translation:
"armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot"
"装弾筒付翼安定徹甲弾"
And the weapon:
"smoothbore gun"
"滑腔砲"
And also terms like:
"Soviet-Sino Conflict"
"中ソ対立"
"中蘇對立"
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"
"社会主義"
or:
"Secretariat"
"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". It should be noted, however, that this is also possible - though obviously to a much lesser degree - for some terms in logogram based languages. For example the United Nations:
"UN"
"国連" (from 国際連合)
Or the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation:
"NATO"
"北約" (from jpn 北大西洋条約機構 or chn 北大西洋公約組織)
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.
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 learnt, and as stated above sentences are relatively short, a logogram-based system allows for faster reading times overall.
See also
External link
- A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective