Written ChineseHan writingSimplified ChineseTraditional ChineseHanyu PinyinHànwénLiteral meaningHan writingWritten Chinese is a writing system that transcribes the varieties of Chinese language using logograms — known as characters — and other symbols such as punctuations. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary.
Egyptian hieroglyphsAncient Egyptian writing systemAncient Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) or hieroglyphics were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood.
Chinese charactersChinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars (Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and Maya script), they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use.
Writing systemA writing system is any conventional system for representing a particular language using a set of symbols (called a script), as well as the rules those symbols encode. The earliest of conventional writing systems appeared during the late 4th millennium BC.
AlphabetAn alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols called graphemes – more commonly known as letters – to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, these graphemes largely correspond to phonemes, which are the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language.
MorphemeA morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression, especially within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
WordA word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial.
Ancient GreekAncient Greek (Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ [hellɛːnikɛ̌ː]) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (c. 1400 – c. 1200 BC), Dark Ages (c. 1200 – c. 800 BC), the Archaic or Homeric period (c. 800 – c. 500 BC), and the Classical period (c. 500 – c. 300 BC).
WritingPersistent representation of languageThe Rosetta Stone (196 BC) bears writing in three different scripts. Hieroglyphs (top) and Demotic (middle) record the same text in the Egyptian language, while an equivalent passage in Greek uses the Greek alphabet (bottom). These correspondences were key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the early 19th century.Writing is the act of creating a persistent, usually visual representation of language on a surface.
SemanticsSemantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points.
CuneiformWriting system of the ancient Near EastThis article contains cuneiform script. Without proper , you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of cuneiform script.Cuneiform is a logo-syllabicwriting system that was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the 1st century BC.
GraphemeSmallest functional written unit Various glyphs representing instances of the lower case letter ⟨a⟩, considered to be allographs of the same grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word grapheme is derived from Ancient Greek's gráphō ('write'), and the suffix -eme (by analogy with phoneme and other emic units). The study of graphemes is called graphemics.
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