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Ideograms (from Greek ιδεα idea "idea" + γραφω grapho "to write") are graphical symbols that are words or morphemes. They are composed of visual elements arranged in a variety of ways rather than using the segmental phoneme principle of construction familiar in alphabetic languages. The effect is that while it is relatively easier to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of ideographs. The other feature of ideographs is that they may be used by a plurality of languages which may pronounce them differently while using them in conformity to the same norms. Thus, arabic numerals function like ideographs. Ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Egyptians from the Mesopotamian and North African centers of civilizations all used some form of ideographical writings, as did the Chinese in the Far East. Early hieroglyphics and cuneiformCuneiform writing is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Created by the Sumerians around 3500 BC, cuneiform began as a system of pictographs. Through repeated use over time, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstr from EgyptJumhuriyat Misr al-Arabiyah ( In Detail) Official language Arabic Capital Cairo Largest City Cairo President Hosni Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif Area Total % water Ranked 29th 1,001,450 kmē 0. 6% Population Total (2003) Density Ranked 15th 74,718,797 were ideograms, though later they were used extensively (and in cuneiform, exclusively) for their pronunciation. In fact Egyptian hieroglyphs, in their most developed stage, represented a merger of ideograms and phonograms which later became the key to its recovery. See Rosetta StoneThe Rosetta Stone is a dark granite stone (often incorrectly identified as " basalt") which provided modern researchers with translations of ancient text in Egyptian demotic script, Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Because Greek was well known, the ston.
Chinese characterTraditional Chinese and other languages. Simplified Chinese Chinese characters or Han characters (/) are used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean languages (though the latter only in South Korea)s, are conventionally called ideographs or ideograms but their own linguistic tradition divides characters into typically at least 5 categories of which "ideograph" is a plausible translation of only one or two. The Chinese classifications are (roughly translated) pictorgram, ideogram, indicative, shape-sound compound, and borrowed. Borrowed characters are homophones used when no more "inventive" character emerges in common use. Pictograms are stylized descendents of alleged early "pictures" of the visual objects they represent--e.g. the character for moon 月 that anciently looked like a crescent moon. Ideographs are typically composed of pictograms arranged "with a convenient story" to suggest something more abstract--like sun and moon together to form a word like 'bright' 明 or the graph for "state" 國 which consists of a box-like border surrounding a population dominated by coercive force. Indicatives are unlike pictograms in that they do not picture things, but "indicate" their use--e.g. the character for 'below' 下 has a dot below the T of a perpendicular diagram while 'above' 上 has an upside down T with the dot above the perpendicular base. The sound-shape compounds typically consist of a classifying unit (typically a pictograph like 'fish' or 'horse' or 'water') combined with a "phonetic" unit that is prounced in the same way in one of the languages using the system. Borrowed characters are homophones with little or no meaning relation that become current before any of the more "inventive" types do. The shape-sound type is most flexible and most new and "sub-species" characters use this principle of construction. New pure ideograms and pictograms are rare--though some have been somewhat playfully composed later such as a square box over a perpendicular line to mean computer. By dictionary count the great bulk of characters (some estimate as many as 90 percent) use the shape-sound principle. Some have advocated calling these phonologogram s. Some advocate using logogramA logogram or logograph is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most Chinese characters are classified as logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the numbers 1 stands for one 2 for two and so on; the as rather than ideograms to describe Chinese writing. Logogram, as suggested by its its Greek components should be word and write so it captures that Chinese characters work like written words. The meanings of Chinese words, like those of other languages, is a function of their use in syntactical structures to reason, refer, and express beliefs etc. Their meaning is not a function of their shape. Japanese ideogramsThe Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is Nihongo . History and classification Historical linguists do not all agree about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several comp, or KanjiKanji (, literally "characters from Han China"; see also Han Chinese) are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the four character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system (the other three being hiragana, katakana and romaji). This, as well as Korean ideogramsThe Korean language is the most widely used language in Korea, and is the official language of both South and North Korea. The language is also spoken widely in neighbouring Yanbian, China. Worldwide, there are around 78 million Korean speakers, including, or Hanja, are mostly Chinese characters, sometimes altered in shape, or native characters made to resemble Chinese characters. (The characters of Japanese origin are called 国字, or kokuji; those of Korean origin, 국자 [國字], or gugja ). From their introduction in the 4th century until the 8th century, Chinese characters were used for phonetic writing, but this is no longer the case. Instead, Japanese developed two scripts for use in phonetic writing - katakana, and its sister syllabary, hiragana, both derived from simplifications of Kanji with the sounds that they represent, while Korean developed a script called hangul.