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A glyph is a graphical representation of a character.
The first writing system was cuneiform, which emerged among the Sumerians towards the end of the 4th millennium BC; however it was followed closely by the appearance of writing in Egypt and the Indus valley, and since then writing has appeared independently a number of times, associated with various civilizations.
Main article: Logogram
A logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most Chinese characters are classified as logograms.
As each character represents a single word (or, more precisely, a morpheme), many logograms are required to write all the words of language. The vast array of logograms and the memorization of what they mean are the major disadvantage of the logographic systems over alphabetic systems. However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, this is only true for closely related languages, like the dialects of Chinese, as syntactical constraints reduce the portability of a given logographic system. Both Korean and Japanese use Chinese logograms in their writing systems, and many of the symbols carry the same meaning in the different languages. However, they are different enough from Chinese that a Chinese text is not easily understood by a Japanese or Korean reader.
While most languages don't use wholly logographic writing systems, many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the Arabic numeralsArabic numerals (also called Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals are by far the most common form of symbolism used to represent numbers. The Arabic numeral system is a positional base 10 numeral system with 10 distinct glyphs representing the 10 numer — everyone who uses those symbols understands what 1 means, whether they call it one, eins, uno, or ichi. Other western logograms include the ampersandAn ampersand is a logogram for the word and''. It is a ligature of the letters in et which is Latin for and''. The symbol's origin is apparent in the example shown below on the right; the example on the left, now more common, is a later development. The n, &, used for and, and the @, used in many contexts for at.
Logograms are sometimes called ideograms, a word that refers to symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas, but linguists avoid this use, as Chinese characters are often semanticIn general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos or "significant meaning," derived from sema sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. Semantics is often opposed to syntax, in which case the former pertains to what something means while t- phonetic compounds, symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and element that represents the pronunciation. Some nonlinguists distinguish between lexigraphy and ideography, where symbols in lexigraphies represent words, and symbols in ideographies represent words or morphemes.
The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters are used, with varying degrees of modification, in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Mayan writing system are also logographic systems, although they have since faded from use.
See List of writing systemsSee writing system for a description of the different kinds of writing systems. The name of the language the script is used to write follows the name of the script, if different. Logographic writing systems Hieroglypics of Ancient Egypt Hanzi ( Chinese) K for the complete list of logographic writing systems.
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