View Shopping Cart Your Famous Chinese Account Shopping Help Famous Chinese Homepage China Chinese Chinese Culture Chinese Restaurant & Chinese Food Travel to China Chinese Economy & Chinese Trade Chinese Medicine & Chinese Herb Chinese Art
logo
Search
March 8, 2014
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
Logogram

Wikipedia

 
Image:Ideogram_ji.jpg|frame|right|A Chinese logogram, which is also an ideogram.
A logogram, or logograph, is a single written character which represents a word (linguistics)|word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other orthography, such as syllabary|syllabaries, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds.

Chinese characters, used in Chinese written language|Chinese and Japanese writing system|Japanese, make up a logographic system. Written Korean_language#Writing_system|Korean used Hanja|a subset of Chinese characters as well until widespread use of Hangul after World War II, as did Vietnamese_language#Writing_system|Vietnamese before French missionaries arrived in Indochina.

A good example of modern Western logograms is the numbers - 1 stands for one, 2 for two and so on; the ampersand & is used for and, while Commercial at|@ sometimes stands for at.

Compared to alphabetical systems, logograms have a disadvantage in that one needs many of them to be able to write down a large number of words. An advantage is that one does not necessarily need to know the language of the writer to understand them - everyone understands what 1 means, whether they call it one, eins, uno or ichi. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but often can in writing, especially if they write in standard written Chinese. In addition, a logogram-based system uses fewer characters to express something than an alphabetic system, a benefit enjoyed by Chinese and to some extent Japanese users of mobile phone web browsers and other devices which display information on a small screen.



  • Ideogram




  • http://www.landlubber.com/dec01/outcry.html A Typographic Outcry: a curious perspective




  • Book reference | Author=John DeFrancis|DeFrancis, John | Title=The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy | Publisher=University of Hawaii Press | Year=1984 | ID=ISBN 0-8248-1068-6

  • Book reference | Author=Hannas, William C. | Title=Asia's Orthographic Dilemma | Publisher=University of Hawaii Press | Year=1997 | ID=ISBN 0-8248-1892-X


Category:Writing
de:Logogramm
fr:Logogramme

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Logogram".


Last Modified:   2005-04-13


Search
All informatin on the site is © FamousChinese.com 2002-2005. Last revised: January 2, 2004
Are you interested in our site or/and want to use our information? please read how to contact us and our copyrights.
To post your business in our web site? please click here. To send any comments to us, please use the Feedback.
To let us provide you with high quality information, you can help us by making a more or less donation: