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IDEOGRAM

An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ιδεα idea "idea" + γραφω grapho "to write") is a graphical 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. Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signage, 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 used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.

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Chinese characters

Main article: Chinese character classification

Chinese characters are conventionally called ideographs or ideograms, but as each character represents a morpheme 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 character 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 "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 arranged to suggest a more abstract concept — for example, the character 明, for "bright" composes of the characters for sun and moon side by side. Many westerners mistakenly believe that all Chinese characters are of this type, but in reality there are very few certain examples.
  • The phono-semantic compounds typically consist of a classifying unit (typically a pictograph like "fish" or "horse" or "water") combined with a "phonetic" unit that is or was pronounced similarly to the entire logogram when the character is or was devised.
  • Borrowed characters are characters representing a morpheme unrelated to its original morpheme based solely on pronunciation.
  • Derived characters are characters that have the same root, but have diverged, possibly due to the morpheme that it itself represents diverging as well.

Phono-semantic compounds are the most flexible and comprise the majority of characters. The character 國 is an example of this, combining a classifying component 囗 and a phonetic component 或. By dictionary count, the great bulk of characters (some estimate as many as 90 percent) use the phono-semantic principle. Some have advocated calling these phonologograms.

Japanese and Korean

Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters 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 different origins across several languages.

Terminological objections

There is a common misconception in the West 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:

See also

References

  • DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810686
  • Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover)
  • Unger, J. Marshall. 2003. Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning. ISBN 0824827600 (trade paperback), ISBN 0824826566 (hardcover)

External links