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Ideograms
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as ''pictograms''. The numerals and mathematical symbols are ideograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so on (compare the section "Mathematics" below). In English, the ampersand & is used for 'and' and (as in many languages) for Latin ' (as in &c for '), % 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. The reason they are ideograms rather than logograms is that they do not denote fixed morphemes: they can be read in many different languages, not just ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Character
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji''. Chinese characters in South Korea, which are known as ''hanja'', retain significant use in Korean academia to study its documents, history, literature and records. Vietnam once used the '' chữ Hán'' and developed chữ Nôm to write Vietnamese before turning to a romanized alphabet. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are grap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logogram
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, 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''. Etymology Doulgas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary states that the term 'logogram' was deriv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pictogram
A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance. A pictogram may also be used in subjects such as leisure, tourism, and geography. Pictography is a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings, similarly to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing, which also uses drawings as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes. Some pictograms, such as Hazards pictograms, are elements of formal languages. "Pictograph" has a different definition in the field of prehistoric art (which includes recent art by traditional societies), where it means art painted on rock surfaces. This is in comparison to petroglyphs, where the images are carved or incised. Such images may ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,000 graphemes in the Old Kingdom period, reduced to around 750 to 850 in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom, but inflated to the order of some 5,000 signs in the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geba Syllabary
''Geba'' is a syllabic script for the Naxi language. It is called ''¹Ggo¹baw'' in Naxi, adapted as ''Geba'', 哥巴, in Chinese. Some glyphs resemble the Yi script, and some appear to be adaptations of Chinese characters. ''Geba'' is used only to transcribe mantras, and there are few texts, though it is sometimes used to annotate ''dongba'' pictographs. Geba's phonetics can vary depending on who is using it. Symbols do not have fixed phonetic values, and they may have the same phonetic values as well. See also *Naxi script The Naxi language of southwestern China may be written in the syllabic ''geba'' script. There is also a Naxi tradition of pictographic symbols called ''dongba''; this may sometimes be glossed with ''geba'' for clarification, since a ''dongba'' t ... External links *Dr. Richard S. CookNaxi Pictographic and Syllabographic Scripts: Research notes toward a Unicode encoding of Naxi Syllabary writing systems Naxi language Writing systems derived from t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dingir
''Dingir'' (, usually transliterated DIĜIR, ) is a Sumerian word for " god" or "goddess". Its cuneiform sign is most commonly employed as the determinative for religious names and related concepts, in which case it is not pronounced and is conventionally transliterated as a superscript "d" as in e.g. d Inanna. The cuneiform sign by itself was originally an ideogram for the Sumerian word ''an'' ("sky" or "heaven");Hayes, 2000 its use was then extended to a logogram for the word ''diĝir'' ("god" or "goddess")Edzard, 2003 and the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon ''An'', and a phonogram for the syllable . Akkadian took over all these uses and added to them a logographic reading for the native '' ilum'' and from that a syllabic reading of . In Hittite orthography, the syllabic value of the sign was again only ''an''. The concept of "divinity" in Sumerian is closely associated with the heavens, as is evident from the fact that the cuneiform sign doubles as the ide ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cuneiform Writing
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: ) which form its signs. Cuneiform was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC. The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian. The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to the cuneiform l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottal Stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . As a result of the obstruction of the airflow in the glottis, the glottal vibration either stops or becomes irregular with a low rate and sudden drop in intensity. Features Features of the glottal stop: * It has no phonation, as there is no airflow through the glottis. It is voiceless, however, in the sense that it is produced without vibration of the vocal cords. Writing In the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with the apostrophe or the symbol ʾ, which is the source of the IPA character . In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a rotated apostrophe, (called '' ‘okina'' in Hawaiian and Sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aleph
Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez . These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of ''*ʾalp'', the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew ''ʾelef'', "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А. Phonetically, ''aleph'' originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the ''aleph'' is an absence of a true co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. The word ''letter'', borrowed from Old French ''letre'', entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the Old English term ( bookstaff). ''Letter'' is descended from the Latin '' littera'', which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (, writing tablet), via Etruscan. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, which is a functional unit in a writing system: a letter (or group of letters) represents visually a phoneme (a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language). Letters are combined to form written words, just as phonemes are combined to form spoken words. A sequence of graphemes representing a phoneme is called a multi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rebus
A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) and the letter "n". It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used in the Middle Ages to denote surnames. For example, in its basic form, three salmon (fish) are used to denote the surname "Salmon". A more sophisticated example was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart (d. 1472) of Norwich, consisting of a stag (or hart) lying down in a conventional representation of water. The composition alludes to the name, profession or personal characteristics of the bearer, and speaks to the beholder ''Non verbis, sed rebus'', which Latin expression signifies "not by words but by things" (''res, rei'' (f), a thing, object, matter; ''rebus'' being ablative plural). Rebuses within heraldry Rebuses are used extensively as a form of heraldic ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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