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Logographic Systems: Hanzi Kanji Hanja Hán T

The document discusses logographic writing systems. It defines logograms as written characters that represent words or morphemes rather than sounds. All known logographic systems incorporate some phonetic elements based on the rebus principle. Examples of logographic scripts discussed include Chinese characters, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform. While no natural language uses a purely logographic system, these scripts represent morphemes that can be extended phonetically to represent syllables or consonants.

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Christian Consigna
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84 views

Logographic Systems: Hanzi Kanji Hanja Hán T

The document discusses logographic writing systems. It defines logograms as written characters that represent words or morphemes rather than sounds. All known logographic systems incorporate some phonetic elements based on the rebus principle. Examples of logographic scripts discussed include Chinese characters, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform. While no natural language uses a purely logographic system, these scripts represent morphemes that can be extended phonetically to represent syllables or consonants.

Uploaded by

Christian Consigna
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In a 

written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents


a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced hanzi in Mandarin, kanji in
Japanese, hanja in Korean and Hán tự in Vietnamese) are generally logograms, as are
many hieroglyphic and cuneiform 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.
Alphabets 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 or orthographic writing.

Contents

 1Logographic systems
 2Semantic and phonetic dimensions
 3Chinese characters
o 3.1Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean
o 3.2Differences in processing of logographic and phonologic languages
 4Advantages and disadvantages
o 4.1Separating writing and pronunciation
o 4.2Characters in information technology
 5See also
 6Notes
 7References
o 7.1Citations
o 7.2Sources
 8External links

Logographic systems[edit]
Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near
East, Africa, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing.
A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and none is known, [1] except for
one devised for the artificial language Toki Pona, which is a purposely limited language with only
120 morphemes. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus
principle 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

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:

o Hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic: 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:

o Anatolian hieroglyphs: Luwian
o Cuneiform: Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic
languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian
o Maya glyphs: Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages
o Han characters: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Zhuang
o Derivatives of Han characters:
 Chữ nôm: Vietnam
 Dongba script written with Geba script: Naxi language (Dongba itself
is pictographic)
 Jurchen script: Jurchen
 Khitan large script: Khitan
 Sawndip: Zhuang languages
 Shui script: Shui language
 Tangut script: Tangut language
 Yi (classical): various Yi languages
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, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知
朱 zhīzhū (literally 'know cinnabar') with the "bug" determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can
be used separately (except to stand in for 蜘蛛 in poetry). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the
reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese
王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king (coincidentally also written 王) 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 花儿 huār 'flower
[diminutive]'.
A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from
the Aramaic abjad) 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 m-l-k would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms,
called hozwārishn (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. In addition,
the numerals and mathematical symbols are logograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so
on. In English, the ampersand & is used for 'and' and (as in many languages) for Latin et (as
in &c for et cetera), % for 'percent' ('per cent'), # for 'number' (or 'pound', among other
meanings), § for 'section', $ for 'dollar', € for 'euro', £ for 'pound', ° for 'degree', @ for 'at', and so on.

Semantic and phonetic dimensions[edit]


Further information: Determinative
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. [a] 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, called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. [b]
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.

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