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logography
Feb. 14th, 2024 07:25 amlogography (loh-GOG-ruh-fee) - n., a writing system in which graphemes primarily represent words.
Contrast the various other writing systems from this week, in which the graphemes represent pronunciations, and using ideographic scripts, where symbols represent ideas and so are incapable of capturing language as spoken (which included a heck of a lot of words that aren't ideas, such as articles/particles and abstractions). OTOH, pretty much every logographic script includes, in practice, have some phonetic use -- and using it that way gets baked into the rules for using logograms (also called logographs). Famous logographies include Chinese characters, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and cuneiform script. Although a set of logograms is large, because each one represents a word, regardless of pronunciation, it can be used by more than one language: cuneiform, invented for Sumerian, it was reused by such entirely unrelated languages as Akkadian, Elamite, and Hittite (among others), and Chinese characters has been used not only mutually unintelligible Sinetic languages but unrelated Viet, Korean, and Japanese (though the latter, they had to add syllabaric signs to capture inflections). Logograph is from Ancient Greek roots logos, word + graphḗ, writing.
And that wraps up this interrupted theme week of writing systems -- I'll fill out the rest of this calendar week with the usual random mix.
---L.
Contrast the various other writing systems from this week, in which the graphemes represent pronunciations, and using ideographic scripts, where symbols represent ideas and so are incapable of capturing language as spoken (which included a heck of a lot of words that aren't ideas, such as articles/particles and abstractions). OTOH, pretty much every logographic script includes, in practice, have some phonetic use -- and using it that way gets baked into the rules for using logograms (also called logographs). Famous logographies include Chinese characters, Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and cuneiform script. Although a set of logograms is large, because each one represents a word, regardless of pronunciation, it can be used by more than one language: cuneiform, invented for Sumerian, it was reused by such entirely unrelated languages as Akkadian, Elamite, and Hittite (among others), and Chinese characters has been used not only mutually unintelligible Sinetic languages but unrelated Viet, Korean, and Japanese (though the latter, they had to add syllabaric signs to capture inflections). Logograph is from Ancient Greek roots logos, word + graphḗ, writing.
And that wraps up this interrupted theme week of writing systems -- I'll fill out the rest of this calendar week with the usual random mix.
---L.
