Ideogram

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An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφω grafo "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, albeit incorrectly, used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. Despite this label, graphemes in logographic systems represent specific words or morphemes in the target language, rather than pure ideas.

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[edit] 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.

[edit] Japanese and Korean

Hanja (Korean Chinese characters) and kanji (Japanese Chinese characters) were directly derived from Chinese characters. Hanja and kanji were (and are) used by older generations, and continue to be learned in schools today.

In Japan, the use of Kanji is widespread and shows no sign of diminishing. Japanese children are taught just over 1,000 characters in primary and secondary school and a few hundred more in high school. Therefore, a Japanese of average education can comfortably read and write most Kanji used in everyday life.

To many people, Korean (hangul) and Japanese (hiragana, katakana) may look like ideograms because they look like "block letters", but that is a misconception. Hangul, hiragana, and katakana were created to make writing and reading easier for the common people, so they are phonetic and not ideographic. Each writing system has an alphabet that pertains to its sound.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Ideograms in English and other Western Languages

Although the concept of using ideograms for everyday writing may at first seem alien to people who are accustomed to the roman alphabet, there are a few ideograms that are, in fact used quite often. For example, the symbol "1" is an ideogram that represents the concept of "one unit".

Simply affirming that this symbol represents the word "one" does not completely describe it, since, for example, "1st" is read "first" and not "onest", and in languages that have the concept of genders, "1" may be read in the masculine or the feminine depending on the word that follows it. In Spanish, "1 silla" is read "una silla" but "1 libro" is read "un libro". Therefore, it becomes clear that the symbol "1" is not the word "one" but, instead, the "concept of one", which is read differently according to the context, much in the same way as hanzi.

[edit] Modern ideograms

Young people (Y-generation) are using more and more emoticons in instant messaging to represent concepts and sometimes phonemes.

[edit] 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:

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