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Ideogram

An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφω grapho "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in alphabetic languages, or a strictly representational picture of a subject as may be done in illustration or photography.

Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signs, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and mathematical notation, which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages.

The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, graphemes in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.

Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character classification

Chinese characters are conventionally called ideographs or ideograms, but as each character represents a morpheme (and is useful almost always as an entire word) rather than an idea, they are more accurately called logograms. Within the Chinese linguistic tradition, characters are divided into six categories, of which "ideograph" is a plausible translation of one. Note that this does not imply that characters in that category represent ideas; they still represent morphemes. The categories are: pictograms, ideograms, compound indicatives, phono-semantic compounds, borrowed characters, and derived characters. The first four are ways characters are composed, while the last two refer to additional methods in which they are used.

• Pictograms are characters derived from pictures of the objects they originally denoted: for example, the character used to write the word meaning "moon", 月, is derived from a stylised picture of a crescent moon.
• Ideograms are unlike pictograms in that they do not picture things, but "indicate" their use — e.g. the character for "below" 下 has a stroke below the T of a perpendicular diagram while "above" 上 has an upside down T with the stroke above the perpendicular base.
• Compound indicatives are typically composed of pictograms or ideograms arranged to remind one of a more abstract word — for example, the character 明, for the word meaning "bright" seems to be composed of pictograms for sun and moon side by side (instead of sun, this is a historically simplified version of a pictogram for window, thus the compound more sensibly reminds one of the subjectively intense brightness of a spot of moonlight in a room). Though many people believe that all Chinese characters are of this type, they actually are relatively few.
• phono-semantic compounds are characters which typically are a combination of one or more units, functioning just as in the compound indicatives above, plus a single phonetic unit, a preexisting character which can suggest our word to us because of its very closely similar pronunciation, at least when our character was divised. Often, but not necessarily, one of the semantic pictograms is a classifier (called a 'radical': some common ones are "hand" and "water") useful in standard indexing schemes.
• Borrowed characters are characters used to represent morphemes unrelated to their original morphemes, based solely on having similar pronunciation.
• Derived characters are characters that have the same etymological root but have diverged, sometimes due to the morpheme itself diverging. The character 國 is a derived character, because the character 或 originally meant state, but this was forgotten due to its being borrowed for the conjunctive, "or".

The phono-semantic compounding process seems to have been the easiest and most flexible way to create characters. By dictionary count, the great bulk of characters (some estimate as many as 90 percent) use the phono-semantic principle.

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 Korean and Japanese languages (where they are known as hanja and kanji, respectively) has resulted in some complications to this picture.

Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Korean and Japanese 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 Korean and Japanese 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. In the modern Korean writing system based on Hangul, Chinese characters are not used any more to represent native morphemes while they are still used that way in Japanese writing system.

Middle Iranian languages

Ideograms are one of the two essential characteristics of the Pahlavi writing system. This system was used for writing several different Middle Iranian languages, including (but not limited to) Parthian (from which 'Pahlavi' gets its name) and Middle Persian (for which the Pahlavi writing system is best attested).

The ideograms in these various Middle Iranian languages are all originally Aramaic language words, Aramaic having previously (under the Achaemenids) been the lingua franca of trade and government. In the later Middle Iranian however, texts were written as spoken, that is, with Iranian language syntactical structure, rather than with Semitic language syntax. The Aramaic words however remained: they were eventually no longer considered alien language words, but "symbols" representing a particular idea.

Thus the word for "king" would not be written phonetically (as far as any consonantary could be described to be phonetic), but as the "symbol" (RtL MLK, malka) representing and spoken as shah. The use of ideograms - later called huzvarishn "archaisms" - was not restricted to texts of commerce or government, or of words relating to those.

Middle Iranian languages were not exclusively written with ideograms. One variant that did not use ideograms is Pazand.

Terminological objections

There is a common misconception that Chinese characters exist separately from spoken language, representing pure ideas which can be determined from their shape. This has led to many attempts to abandon the name "ideogram" in favour of a term that more accurately represents their morphemic (and often phonetic) nature: that is, that they represent words and syllables, not ideas. One alternative is logogram, from the Greek roots logos ("word") and grapho ("to write"). Others include Sinogram, emphasising the Chinese origin of the characters, and Han character, a literal translation of the native term. These terms have gained some currency among scholars, but have failed to spread into common usage. The native terms (Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji) are also fairly widespread in the contexts of the individual languages, but they are not generally considered suitable for discussion of the script as a whole.

True ideographic systems:

• Blissymbols
• Formal languages such as mathematical notation, logic, UML, computer languages
• Hobo signs - American hoboes
• Sioux and Ojibwa pictographs - Sioux and Ojibwa

See also

• Asemic Writing
• Energy Systems Language
• Icon (computing)
• Lexigram
• Logotype
• Sona language
• Traffic sign
• Isotype (pictograms)

References

• DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6
• Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover)
• Unger, J. Marshall. 2003. Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning. ISBN 0-8248-2760-0 (trade paperback), ISBN 0-8248-2656-6 (hardcover)

External links

• AIGA Symbol Signs Common US ideograms.
• American Heritage Dictionary definition
• Encyclopedia Britannica online entry
• Hobo Signs
• The Ideographic Myth Extract from DeFrancis' book.
• Merriam-Webster OnLine definition
• Ojibwa and Sioux pictographs