Logogram facts for kids
Imagine a secret code where each symbol stands for a whole word or idea! That's pretty much what a logogram is. It's a written character that represents a complete word or a part of a word (called a morpheme) in a language.
Think of Chinese characters used in China, or the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, or even the symbols in cuneiform script. These are all examples of logograms. A writing system that mainly uses logograms is called a logography.
Other writing systems, like alphabets (where letters stand for sounds, like English) or syllabaries (where symbols stand for syllables, like Japanese kana), are different. Their symbols represent sounds directly and don't have a meaning on their own.
However, even logographic systems use some sound-based parts. This often happens through the rebus principle. This is like using a picture of an eye to mean "I," or a picture of a bee to mean "be." Adding these sound-based parts was a big step in making writing systems work well for human language.
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Types of Logograms
The very first writing systems used by ancient civilizations like those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica all used some form of logographic writing.
All logographic scripts that have been used for real languages rely on the rebus principle. This means they use some characters for their sound, not just their meaning. This helps them create more words from a smaller set of symbols. When characters represent both words and syllables, the system is sometimes called a logosyllabary.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ch'olti', and Chinese writing also developed "determinatives." These are extra symbols added to logograms to help make their meaning clearer. In Chinese, these are often combined with sound-based parts to form new characters.
Logoconsonantal Scripts
In these scripts, symbols can be used for their consonant sounds, even if the vowels change. For example, in ancient Egyptian, a symbol for 'duck' (sȝ) could also be used for 'son' (sȝ). The main examples of logoconsonantal scripts are Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic scripts used for the Ancient Egyptian language.
Logosyllabic Scripts
Logosyllabic scripts have symbols that represent whole words or parts of words. But when they are used for their sound, they represent single syllables. Examples include cuneiform, Anatolian hieroglyphs, Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A and Linear B, Chinese characters, Maya script, Aztec script, and Mixtec script.
Chinese Characters
Chinese characters, called hànzì, are a great example of logograms. Chinese scholars have traditionally grouped them into six types based on how they were created or used.
The first two types are "single-body" characters, meaning they were created on their own. The next two are "compound" methods, where characters are made by putting different characters together. The last two types describe how characters are used.
- Pictograms: These are like little pictures of the word they represent. For example, 山 looks like a mountain and means 'mountain'.
- Ideograms: These try to show abstract ideas. For instance, 上 means 'up' and 下 means 'down'. Some ideograms are pictograms with an extra mark to show an idea. Like 刀 is a picture of a 'knife', but 刃 adds a dot to show the 'blade' of the knife.
- Radical–radical compounds: These characters combine two or more parts (called radicals), where each part gives a hint about the meaning. For example, 休 'rest' is made of the character for 'person' (人) and 'tree' (木). It's like a person leaning against a tree to rest!
- Radical–phonetic compounds: This is the most common type, making up about 90% of Chinese characters! One part (the radical) gives a general idea of the meaning, and the other part (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. For example, 樑 (liáng) means 'supporting beam'. The radical 木 ('wood') tells you it's made of wood, and the phonetic 梁 (also liáng) tells you how to say it.
- Changed-annotation characters: These are characters that started as one, but over time, they split into different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations. For example, 樂 / 乐 can mean both 'music' (yuè) and 'pleasure' (lè).
- Improvisational characters: Sometimes, a spoken word didn't have a character. So, people "borrowed" another character that sounded the same or similar. For example, 自 used to mean 'nose' (it was a pictogram!). But it was borrowed to mean 'self', and now that's almost its only meaning.
Over a long time, the sounds of Chinese changed. This means that the "hints" about pronunciation in radical-phonetic characters might not be very helpful today. For example, 每 (měi, 'each') is part of 侮 (wǔ, 'to humiliate'), 悔 (huǐ, 'to regret'), and 海 (hǎi, 'sea'). In ancient times, these words sounded very similar, but now their pronunciations are quite different!
Chinese Characters in Japanese and Korean
When Chinese characters (called hanzi) were adopted by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja, respectively), things got a bit more complex.
Many Chinese words were borrowed into Japanese and Korean along with their characters. So, the meaning and the character came together. But sometimes, characters were borrowed just for their meaning to represent native Japanese or Korean words. This means one character can end up representing several words that have similar meanings but come from different languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes called morphographic writing systems.
Pros and Cons of Logograms
Writing and Pronunciation
One big difference with logograms is that the symbols are not directly tied to how they are pronounced. This can be an advantage! For example, the symbol 1 is understood by everyone, whether they say "one" (English), "ichi" (Japanese), or "wāḥid" (Arabic).
Similarly, people who speak different varieties of Chinese might not understand each other when they talk. But they can often understand each other quite well when they write, even if they don't write in Standard Chinese. This is why, in ancient East Asia, writing was a common way for countries like China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan to communicate in trade and diplomacy.
However, this separation also has a big downside. You have to memorize each logogram separately from its pronunciation when you're learning to read and write. Japanese adds another layer of difficulty because almost every logogram can have more than one pronunciation!
On the other hand, phonetic writing systems (like alphabets) are written exactly as they are spoken. But this can lead to problems if pronunciations change slightly. Many alphabetic systems, like Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish, try to keep a close link between characters and sounds. But others, like English, French, Thai, and Tibetan, are more complicated. Character combinations can be pronounced in many ways, often because of how the language changed over time.
Hangul, the writing system for the Korean language, is a great example of an alphabetic script that was created to replace the logogrammatic hanja. This was done to help more people learn to read and write. Hanja is rarely used now, but it still appears sometimes in South Korea, often mixed with Hangul.
In China, the most commonly used 3,500 characters cover about 99.48% of words in a large sample of text. For traditional Chinese characters, about 4,700-4,800 characters are taught in elementary and junior secondary school. After elementary school, students learn more new words, but these are mostly combinations of characters they already know.
Logograms and Computers
Typing complex logograms on electronic devices can be tricky because there are so many different symbols. There are different ways to enter logograms. Some methods break them down into their parts, like the Cangjie and Wubi methods for Chinese. Other methods use phonetic systems, like Bopomofo or Pinyin, where you type the sound of the word and then choose the correct logogram from a list. Typing by breaking characters into parts can be faster once you learn it, but it's harder to learn.
Because there are so many logograms, computers need more memory to store each one. For example, a simple coding system like ISO 8859 uses only one byte for each character. But UTF-8, which can handle many more characters, might need up to three bytes for a single logogram. However, English words, for instance, average about five letters plus a space, which is six bytes per word. Since many logograms represent a whole word, it's not always clear which system uses less memory overall. Modern coding systems like Unicode use "variable-width encoding," which means they only use the bytes needed for each character, making it more efficient.
Images for kids
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An old Chinese primer from 1436 showing Chinese characters.
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