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An ideogram or ideograph (from
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
"idea" and "to write") is a
graphic Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, ...
symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...
that represents an
idea In common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of be ...
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 ''
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 g ...
s''. The
numerals A numeral is a figure, symbol, or group of figures or symbols denoting a number. It may refer to: * Numeral system used in mathematics * Numeral (linguistics), a part of speech denoting numbers (e.g. ''one'' and ''first'' in English) * Numerical ...
and mathematical symbols are ideograms – 1 'one', 2 'two', + 'plus', = 'equals', and so on (compare the section "Mathematics" below). In English, the
ampersand The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters ''et''—Latin for "and". Etymology Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter tha ...
& is used for 'and' and (as in many languages) for
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...
' (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
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 ...
s is that they do not denote fixed
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...
s: they can be read in many different languages, not just English. There is not always only a single way to read them and they are in some cases read as a complex phrase rather than a single word.


Terminology

In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, or
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 g ...
s. For example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts. The term "ideogram" is often used to describe symbols of
writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable for ...
s such as
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, ...
, Sumerian cuneiform and
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 '' kan ...
s. However, these symbols represent elements of a particular language, mostly words or morphemes (so that they are
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 ...
s), rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols. Pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ''ʾālep'' "ox". Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, borrowing a symbol for a similarly-sounding word. Later systems used selected symbols to represent the sounds of the language, for example the adaptation of the logogram for ''ʾālep'' "ox" as the letter
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 let ...
representing the initial sound of the word, a glottal stop. Many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. For example, the Sumerian sign DIĜIR () could represent the word ''diĝir'' 'deity', the god An or the word ''an'' 'sky'. The Akkadian counterpart could represent the Akkadian stem '' il-'' 'deity', the Akkadian word ''šamu'' 'sky', or the syllable ''an''. Although Chinese characters are logograms, two of the smaller classes in the traditional classification are ideographic in origin: * Simple ideographs (指事字 ''zhǐshìzì'') are abstract symbols such as 上 ''shàng'' "up" and 下 ''xià'' "down" or numerals such as 三 ''sān'' "three". * Semantic compounds (会意字 ''huìyìzì'') are semantic combinations of characters, such as 明 ''míng'' "bright", composed of 日 ''rì'' "sun" and 月 ''yuè'' "moon", or 休 ''xiū'' "rest", composed of 人 ''rén'' "person" and 木 ''mù'' "tree". In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds have an at least partially phonetic nature. An example of ideograms is the collection of 50 signs developed in the 1970s by the American Institute of Graphic Arts at the request of the US Department of Transportation. The system was initially used to mark airports and gradually became more widespread.


Mathematics

Mathematical symbols are a type of ideogram.


Proposed universal languages

Inspired by inaccurate early descriptions of Chinese and Japanese
character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
s as ideograms, many Western thinkers have sought to design universal written languages, in which symbols denote concepts rather than words. An early proposal was '' An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language'' (1668) by John Wilkins. A recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was devised by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols.Unger (2003), pp. 13–16.


See also

* Character (computing) * Character (symbol) *
Emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed convers ...
*
Epigraphy Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...
, the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, including ideographic inscriptions *
Heterogram (linguistics) Heterogram ( classical compound: " different" + " written") is a term used mostly in the study of ancient texts for a special kind of a logogram consisting of the embedded written representation of a word in a foreign language, which does not hav ...
* Icon (computing) *
Lexigrams Yerkish is an artificial language developed for use by non-human primates. It employs a keyboard whose keys contain ''lexigrams'', symbols corresponding to objects or ideas. Lexigrams were notably used by the Georgia State University Language Res ...
*
List of symbols Many (but not all) graphemes that are part of a writing system that encodes a full spoken language are included in the Unicode standard, which also includes graphical symbols. See: * Language code * List of Unicode characters * List of writin ...
*
List of writing systems This is a list of writing systems (or scripts), classified according to some common distinguishing features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the language(s) in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particula ...
(including a sublist of ideographic systems) * Logotype * Segmental script (a script that has a grapheme for each phoneme) *
Therblig Therbligs are 18 kinds of elemental motions, used in the study of motion economy in the workplace. A workplace task is analyzed by recording each of the therblig units for a process, with the results used for optimization of manual labour by elimin ...
* Traffic sign


References

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


External links


The Ideographic Myth
Extract from DeFrancis' book.
Merriam-Webster OnLine definition
{{Authority control Communication design Graphic design Pictograms Writing systems