An ideogram or ideograph is a graphicsymbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
Terminology
In proto-writing, used for inventories and the like, physical objects are represented by stylized or conventionalized pictures, or pictograms. For example, the pictorial Dongba symbols without Geba annotation cannot represent the Naxi language, but are used as a mnemonic for reciting oral literature. Some systems also use ideograms, symbols denoting abstract concepts. The term "ideogram" is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols represent elements of a particular language, mostly words or morphemes, rather than objects or concepts. In these writing systems, a variety of strategies were employed in the design of logographic symbols. Pictographic symbols depict the object referred to by the word, such as an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep "ox". Some words denoting abstract concepts may be represented iconically, but most other words are represented using the rebus principle, borrowing a symbol for a similarly-sounding word. Later systems used selected symbols to represent the sounds of the language, for example the adaptation of the logogram for ʾālep "ox" as the letteraleph representing the initial sound of the word, a glottal stop. Many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. For example, the Akkadian sign DIĜIR could represent the god An, the word diĝir 'deity' or the word an 'sky'. The Akkadian counterpart could represent the Akkadian stem il- 'deity', the Akkadian word šamu 'sky', or the syllable an. Although Chinese characters are logograms, two of the smaller classes in the traditional classification are ideographic in origin:
Simple ideographs are abstract symbols such as 上 shàng "up" and 下 xià "down" or numerals such as 三 sān "three".
Semantic compounds are semantic combinations of characters, such as 明 míng "bright", composed of 日 rì "sun" and 月 yuè "moon", or 休 xiū "rest", composed of 人 rén "person" and 木 mù "tree". In the light of the modern understanding of Old Chinese phonology, researchers now believe that most of the characters originally classified as semantic compounds have an at least partially phonetic nature.
Inspired by inaccurate early descriptions of Chinese and Japanese characters as ideograms, many Western thinkers have sought to design universal written languages, in which symbols denote concepts rather than words. An early proposal was An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language by John Wilkins. A recent example is the system of Blissymbols, which was proposed by Charles K. Bliss in 1949 and currently includes over 2,000 symbols.
