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In a
written language A written language is the representation of a spoken or gestural language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will pick up spoken language or sign language by exposure even i ...
, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a
written character In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''
hanzi Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
'' in Mandarin, '' kanji'' in Japanese, '' hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and
cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system, script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East, Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is nam ...
characters. The use of logograms in writing is called ''logography'', and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a ''logography'' or ''logographic system''. All known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the
rebus principle A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) ...
.
Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letter (alphabet), letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character ...
s and syllabaries are distinct from logographies in that they use individual written characters to represent sounds directly. Such characters are called '' phonograms'' in linguistics. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not have any inherent meaning. Writing language in this way is called ''
phonemic writing A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographi ...
'' or ''orthographic writing''.


Etymology

Doulgas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term 'logogram' was derived from Greek logos "word, discourse; reason". and that the term 'logo' was derived ''from'' the term 'logogram', not the other way round.


Logographic systems

Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of the Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing. A ''purely'' logographic script would be impractical for many other languages, and none is known. All logographic scripts ever used for
natural languages In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
rely on the
rebus principle A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) ...
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 and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of determinatives, which are combined with logograms to narrow down their possible meaning. In Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such " radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script. Both languages relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. 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 G38 was used to write both ''sȝ'' 'duck' and ''sȝ'' 'son', though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same except for their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are: ** Hieroglyphs, hieratic, and
demotic Demotic may refer to: * Demotic Greek, the modern vernacular form of the Greek language * Demotic (Egyptian), an ancient Egyptian script and version of the language * Chữ Nôm, the demotic script for writing Vietnamese See also * * Demos (dis ...
: Ancient Egyptian * Logosyllabic scripts *: These are scripts in which the graphemes represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include: *: **
Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system, script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East, Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is nam ...
: Sumerian,
Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic ...
, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite,
Luwian The Luwians were a group of Anatolian peoples who lived in central, western, and southern Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the Luwian language, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian sub-fam ...
, Hurrian, and Urartian ** Anatolian hieroglyphs:
Luwian The Luwians were a group of Anatolian peoples who lived in central, western, and southern Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. They spoke the Luwian language, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian sub-fam ...
**
Cretan hieroglyphs Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. They predate Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. , they ...
: Minoan language. ** Linear A: Minoan language. ** Linear B: Mycenaean Greek. **
Cypro-Minoan Syllabary The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus during the late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on M ...
:
Eteocypriot Eteocypriot is an extinct pre-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by the pre-Hellenic population until the Iron Age. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern schola ...
** Yi (classical): various
Yi languages The Yi or Nuosu people,; zh, c=彝族, p=Yízú, l=Yi ethnicity historically known as the Lolo,; vi, Lô Lô; th, โล-โล, Lo-Lo are an ethnic group in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. Numbering nine million people, they are the seven ...
**
Han characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
:
Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of v ...
, Korean,
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
, Vietnamese ** Derivatives of Han characters: ***
Chữ nôm Chữ Nôm (, ; ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters (''Chữ Hán'') to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented ...
: Vietnamese *** Sawndip:
Zhuang languages The Zhuang languages (; autonym: , pre-1982: , Sawndip: 話僮, from ''vah'', 'language' and ''Cuengh'', 'Zhuang'; ) are any of more than a dozen Tai languages spoken by the Zhuang people of Southern China in the province of Guangxi and adjacen ...
***
Jurchen script The Jurchen script (Jurchen: ) was the writing system used to write the Jurchen language, the language of the Jurchen people who created the Jin Empire in northeastern China in the 12th–13th centuries. It was derived from the Khitan script, ...
:
Jurchen Jurchen may refer to: * Jurchen people, Tungusic people who inhabited the region of Manchuria until the 17th century ** Haixi Jurchens, a grouping of the Jurchens as identified by the Chinese of the Ming Dynasty ** Jianzhou Jurchens, a grouping of ...
***
Khitan large script The Khitan large script () was one of two writing systems used for the now-extinct Khitan language (the other was the Khitan small script). It was used during the 10th–12th centuries by the Khitan people, who had created the Liao Empire in nor ...
: Khitan ***
Sui script The Sui script (Sui: ''le1 sui3,'' Simplified Chinese: 水书, Traditional Chinese: 水書, Pinyin: ''Shuǐshū)'' or Shuishu, is a logographic writing system with some pictographic characters that can be used to write the Sui language (Wei 2003:x ...
:
Sui language The Sui language () is a Kam–Sui language spoken by the Sui people of Guizhou province in China. According to Ethnologue, it was spoken by around 300,000 people in 2007. Sui is also unique for its rich inventory of consonants, with the Sandong ...
*** Tangut script:
Tangut language Tangut (Tangut: ; ) is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Tangut was one of the official languages of the Western Xia dynasty, founded by the Tangut people in northwestern China. The Western Xia was annihilated by the Mongo ...
*** Dongba script written with Geba script: Naxi language (Dongba itself is pictographic) **
Maya Glyphs Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...
: Ch'olti',
Yucatec Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic commu ...
and other
Mayan Languages The Mayan languagesIn linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and as ...
** Aztec Glyphs: Nahuatl (partly pictographic, partly logosyllabic) ** Mixtec Glyphs:
Mixtec Languages The Mixtec () languages belong to the Mixtecan group of the Oto-Manguean language family. Mixtec is spoken in Mexico and is closely related to Trique and Cuicatec. The varieties of Mixtec are spoken by over half a million people.2000 census; ...
(partly pictographic, partly logosyllabic) 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, ''zhīzhū'', was created by fusing the rebus ''zhīzhū'' (literally "know cinnabar") with the "bug" determinative . Neither * ''zhī'' nor * ''zhū'' can be used separately in modern spoken Chinese (except to stand in for as a root word, for example 蛛丝 means spider silk). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 ''hjwangs'' (meaning "proclaim oneself king"), 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 ''huār'' 'flower iminutive. A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the Aramaic
abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...
) 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 ' would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called (a form of heterograms), 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.


Semantic and phonetic dimensions

All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. 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. Many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component (see ideogram), called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage was to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinate 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 nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.


Chinese characters

Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters ('' hànzì'') into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other 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. # 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'. # The second type are the ideograms that attempt to visualize abstract
concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by sev ...
s, 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'. # 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 'person' () and 'tree' (), with the intended idea of someone leaning against a tree, i.e. resting. # 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 (''liáng''), where the phonetic ''liáng'' indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% 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, can mean both 'music' (''yuè'') and 'pleasure' (''lè''). # 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. For example, used to be a pictographic word meaning 'nose', but was borrowed to mean 'self', and is now used almost exclusively to mean the latter; the original meaning survives only in stock phrases and more archaic compounds. Because of their derivational process, the entire set of
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
kana can be considered to be of this type of character, hence the name ''kana'' (lit. 'borrowed names'). Example: Japanese ; is a simplified form of Chinese used in Korea and Japan, and is the Chinese name for this type of characters. 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 and were typically ignored; these developed into tones in
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Sw ...
, 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 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. 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 ''měi'' in
Standard Mandarin Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...
, are the characters 'to humiliate', 'to regret', and 'sea', pronounced respectively ''wǔ'', ''huǐ'', and ''hǎi'' in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese –  (每), } (悔), and } (海) according to a recent reconstruction by
William H. Baxter William Hubbard Baxter III (born March 3, 1949) is an American linguist specializing in the history of the Chinese language and best known for his work on the reconstruction on Old Chinese. Biography Baxter earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 19 ...
and
Laurent Sagart Laurent Sagart (; born 1951) is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO – UMR 8563) unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Biography Born in Paris in 1951, he earned hi ...
– 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.


Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean

Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as
hanzi Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...
) by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however, the adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja, respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean 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 Japanese and Korean morphemes, on the basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but with different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as
morphographic A morphogram is the representation of a morpheme by a grapheme based solely on its meaning. Kanji is a writing system that make use of morphograms, where Chinese characters were borrowed to represent native morphemes because of their meanings. Thus, ...
writing systems.


Differences in processing of logographic and phonologic writing systems

Because much research on language processing has centered on English and other alphabetically written languages, many theories of language processing have stressed the role of phonology in producing speech. Contrasting logographically coded languages, where a single character is represented phonetically and ideographically, with phonetically/phonemically spelled languages has yielded insights into how different languages rely on different processing mechanisms. Studies on the processing of logographically coded languages have amongst other things looked at neurobiological differences in processing, with one area of particular interest being hemispheric lateralization. Since logographically coded languages are more closely associated with images than alphabetically coded languages, several researchers have hypothesized that right-side activation should be more prominent in logographically coded languages. Although some studies have yielded results consistent with this hypothesis there are too many contrasting results to make any final conclusions about the role of hemispheric lateralization in orthographically versus phonetically coded languages. Another topic that has been given some attention is differences in processing of homophones. Verdonschot et al. examined differences in the time it took to read a homophone out loud when a picture that was either related or unrelated to a homophonic character was presented before the character. Both Japanese and Chinese homophones were examined. Whereas word production of alphabetically coded languages (such as English) has shown a relatively robust immunity to the effect of context stimuli, Verdschot et al. found that Japanese homophones seem particularly sensitive to these types of effects. Specifically, reaction times were shorter when participants were presented with a phonologically related picture before being asked to read a target character out loud. An example of a phonologically related stimulus from the study would be for instance when participants were presented with a picture of an elephant, which is pronounced ''zou'' in Japanese, before being presented with the Chinese character , which is also read ''zou''. No effect of phonologically related context pictures were found for the reaction times for reading Chinese words. A comparison of the (partially) logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese is interesting because whereas the Japanese language consists of more than 60% homographic heterophones (characters that can be read two or more different ways), most Chinese characters only have one reading. Because both languages are logographically coded, the difference in latency in reading aloud Japanese and Chinese due to context effects cannot be ascribed to the logographic nature of the writing systems. Instead, the authors hypothesize that the difference in latency times is due to additional processing costs in Japanese, where the reader cannot rely solely on a direct orthography-to-phonology route, but information on a lexical-syntactical level must also be accessed in order to choose the correct pronunciation. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies finding that Japanese
Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As ...
patients whose comprehension of characters had deteriorated still could read the words out loud with no particular difficulty. Studies contrasting the processing of English and Chinese homophones in
lexical decision task The lexical decision task (LDT) is a procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords. Although versions of the task had been used ...
s have found an advantage for homophone processing in Chinese, and a disadvantage for processing homophones in English. The processing disadvantage in English is usually described in terms of the relative lack of homophones in the English language. When a homophonic word is encountered, the phonological representation of that word is first activated. However, since this is an ambiguous stimulus, a matching at the orthographic/lexical ("mental dictionary") level is necessary before the stimulus can be disambiguated, and the correct pronunciation can be chosen. In contrast, in a language (such as Chinese) where many characters with the same reading exists, it is hypothesized that the person reading the character will be more familiar with homophones, and that this familiarity will aid the processing of the character, and the subsequent selection of the correct pronunciation, leading to shorter reaction times when attending to the stimulus. In an attempt to better understand homophony effects on processing, Hino et al. conducted a series of experiments using Japanese as their target language. While controlling for familiarity, they found a processing advantage for homophones over non-homophones in Japanese, similar to what has previously been found in Chinese. The researchers also tested whether orthographically similar homophones would yield a disadvantage in processing, as has been the case with English homophones, but found no evidence for this. It is evident that there is a difference in how homophones are processed in logographically coded and alphabetically coded languages, but whether the advantage for processing of homophones in the logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese (i.e. their writing systems) is due to the logographic nature of the scripts, or if it merely reflects an advantage for languages with more homophones regardless of script nature, remains to be seen.


Advantages and disadvantages


Separating writing and pronunciation

The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called ''one'', ''ichi'' or ''wāḥid'' by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to a significant extent in writing even if they do not write in Standard Chinese. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing () was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical Chinese. This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek, Latin,
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional It ...
,
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
, and Finnish make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Both English and French orthography are more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul, the Korean language's writing system, is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul. According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the People's Republic of China's " Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese" (, ''Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo'') cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "
Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters The Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters or the Table of Standard Typefaces for Frequently-Used Chinese Characters () is a list of 4,808 commonly used Chinese characters. The standard typefaces were prescribed by Taiwan's Ministr ...
" () by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China, while 4,759 in the "''Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu''" () by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters.


Characters in information technology

Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to a practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various
input method An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...
s for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the
Cangjie Cangjie () is a legendary ancient Chinese figure said to have been an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of Chinese characters. Legend has it that he had four eyes, and that when he invented the characters, the deities a ...
and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as
Bopomofo Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe ...
or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered. Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one
byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
for each grapheme, while the
Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadeci ...
encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only the bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that results merging large character sets with smaller ones.


See also

* Emoji * Logo * Symbol *
Syllabogram Syllabograms are grapheme, signs used to write the syllables (or Mora (linguistics), morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols repre ...
*
Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Ce ...
*
Rebus A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+ ...
, the use of pictures to represent words or parts of words


Notes


References


Citations


Sources

* * * *


External links


古代文字資料館 Ancient Writing Library


{{list of writing systems Graphemes