A morphogram is the representation of a

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

by a

grapheme 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' ...

based solely on its meaning.

Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subse ...

is a writing system that make use of morphograms, where Chinese characters were borrowed to represent native morphemes because of their meanings. Thus, a single character can represent a variety of morphemes which originally all had the same meaning. An example of this in Japanese would be the grapheme 東 ast which can be read as ''higashi'' or ''azuma'', in addition to its

logographic In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced '' hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, ...

representation of the morpheme ''tō''. Additionally, in Japanese, the logographic (Chinese-derived) reading is called the ''on'yomi'' reading, and the morphographic reading (native Japanese) is called the ''kun'yomi'' reading.

References

* Smith, J.S. (1996). Japanese Writing. In P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (Eds.), ''The World’s Writing Systems'' (pp. 209–217). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc. Writing systems Graphemes Logographic writing systems Linguistic morphology

See also

References