Logography

In written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or phrase. Chinese characters and Japanese kanji are logograms; some Egyptian hieroglyphs and some graphemes in cuneiform script are also logograms. The use of logograms in writing is called logography. A writing system that is based on logograms is called a logographic system.

In alphabets and syllabaries, individual written characters represent sounds rather than concepts. These characters are called phonograms. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not necessarily have meaning by themselves, but are combined to make words and phrases that have meaning. Writing language in this way is called phonemic orthography.

Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing.

A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and none is known, apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki Pona, which is a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinatives; such "radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple rebuses to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.

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