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Hieroglyphs to Logographs

wpeac13c9a_1b.jpg At about the time of the emergence of cuneiform the Egyptians were developing their own writing system. Consisting of characters called hieroglyphs (from the Greek, meaning “sacred carving”), they were possibly based on pictograms, ideograms and rebus devices.

 

wp17e656cc_1b.jpg The pyramids of Egypt contain an awesome array of well-preserved hieroglyphs and we have learnt much about the Egyptians from the writings in their temples and tombs. The symbols used eventually came to represent syllables and thus far the written language shared the syllabic aspect with Mesopotamia and Babylon. Around 3500 years ago the Phoenicians refined the Egyptian hieroglyphs into a set of consonants and vowels to suit their own syllabic writing system.

 

By now we can begin to see the emergence of symbols related to sounds in the spoken language, rather than pictorial, word-based representation. There are many benefits in using this system, not least because you can be much more specific about ideas and notions than mere representation of the concept as a whole.

 

Conversation, in a well-developed language, can express thoughts pretty closely and it became necessary to be able to emulate that discussion in such a way that you could understand it as if it were actually being talked about.

 

Some of the eastern countries, by contrast, still use pictograms and ideograms in a form called logograms in their writings today. This is evident in Chinese and Japanese in particular. They are literally sets of visual characters that have developed into a series of ‘logos’ over time, each logo representing a word. Because of the diversity of spoken language in China there are thousands of these characters and it can take a lifetime to learn them all. To top it all, unlike an alphabetic writing system, the Chinese need to invent new characters, and learn them, for new words introduced into their language. This means that the number of characters in their ‘alphabet’ is always growing.

 

The advantage of logographs, for the Chinese, is that although many different languages are spoken across their vast continent, their written characters are the same. This means that two people from opposite sides of the country can communicate by the written word even if they can’t understand each other’s speech. The other amazing fact is that Japanese or Chinese people can understand some of each other's symbols.