The Hieroglyphic script is a challenge to encode, since it consists of logograms (signs that represent languages units), phonograms (signs that represent sounds), and determinatives (signs that join together and clarify logograms and phonograms).
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Not all hieroglyphics are logograms, which represent complete words or phrases, but some are, in that they are pictures to represent ideas.
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Eventually, she discovers that the aliens speak using logograms — inkblot-like symbols that can stand for a word, an entire sentence, or even a feeling.
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Mayan writing consists of logograms (signs representing whole words; for example, a jaguar head for "jaguar") and syllabograms (signs representing syllables; "ka" + "ka" + "u" = cacao).
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I wasn't even going to attempt an explanation of my inability to read hanzi logograms—let alone start braying like a donkey to convey the type of meat.
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I stare up and down the aisles of sauces and dried fish and jujubes, feigning confidence as I pretend to read the logograms and know what to do with jars of fermented bean curd.
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Yonaguni was once written with a unique writing system called Kaidā logograms. However, after conquest by the Ryukyu Kingdom and later annexation by the Empire of Japan, the logograms were replaced by Japanese kana and Kanji.
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Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms In a written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced hanzi in Mandarin, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean and Hán tự in Vietnamese) are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters. The use of logograms in writing is called logography, and a writing system that is based on logograms is called a logography or logographic system. All known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle.
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Kudrinski M. and I. Yakubovich. 2016. Sumerograms and Akkadograms in Hittite: Ideograms, Logograms, Allograms, or Heterograms? Altorientalische Forschungen 43(1-2): 53-66. In Middle Iranian scripts derived from the Aramaic scripts (such as the Pahlavi scripts), all logograms are heterograms coming from Aramaic.
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Early Chinese character for sun (ri), 1200 B.C meaning "day" or "Sun" A logogram is a single written character which represents a complete grammatical word. Most traditional 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 major disadvantages of logographic systems over alphabetic systems.
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While most languages do not use wholly logographic writing systems, many languages use some logograms. A good example of modern western logograms are the Arabic numerals: everyone who uses those symbols understands what 1 means whether they call it one, eins, uno, yi, ichi, ehad, ena, or jedan. Other western logograms include the ampersand &, used for and, the at sign @, used in many contexts for at, the percent sign % and the many signs representing units of currency ($, ¢, €, £, ¥ and so on.) 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 semantic–phonetic compounds, symbols which include an element that represents the meaning and a phonetic complement 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.
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Classic Maya is the principal language documented in the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya, and is particularly represented in inscriptions from the lowland regions in Mexico and the period c. 200--900\. The writing system (generally known as the Maya script) has some similarities in function (but is not related) to other logosyllabic writing systems such as the cuneiform originating in Sumer, in which a combination of logographic and syllabic signs (graphemes) are used. The script's corpus of graphemes features a core of syllabic signs which reflect the phonology of the Classic Maya language spoken in the region and at that time, which were also combined or complemented by a larger number of logograms. Thus the expressions of Classic Maya could be written in a variety of ways, represented either as logograms, logograms with phonetic complements, logograms plus syllables, or in a purely syllabic combination.
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As exhibited at Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete, Greece. Dots represent numerals Symbol inventories have been compiled by Evans (1909), Meijer (1982), and Olivier/Godart (1996). The glyph inventory in CHIC includes 96 syllabograms representing sounds, ten of which double as logograms, representing words or portions of words. There are also 23 logograms representing four levels of numerals (units, tens, hundreds, thousands), numerical fractions, and two types of punctuation.
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Comparative evolution from pictograms to abstract shapes, in Mesopotamian cuneiforms, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. A logogram is a written character which represents a word or morpheme. A vast number of logograms are needed to write Chinese characters, cuneiform, and Mayan, where a glyph may stand for a morpheme, a syllable, or both—("logoconsonantal" in the case of hieroglyphs). Many logograms have an ideographic component (Chinese "radicals", hieroglyphic "determiners").
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700px Common words are represented by special outlines called logograms (or "Short Forms" in Pitman's New Era). Words and phrases which have such forms are called grammalogues. Hundreds exist and only a tiny number are shown above. The shapes are written separately to show that they represent distinct words, but in common phrases ("you are", "thank you", etc.) two or three logograms may be joined together, or a final flick added to represent the.
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For example, a calendaric glyph can be read as the morpheme or as the syllable chi. Glyphs used as syllabograms were originally logograms for single-syllable words, usually those that ended in a vowel or in a weak consonant such as y, w, h, or glottal stop. For example, the logogram for 'fish fin'—found in two forms, as a fish fin and as a fish with prominent fins—was read as [kah] and came to represent the syllable ka. These syllabic glyphs performed two primary functions: as phonetic complements to disambiguate logograms which had more than one reading (similar to ancient Egyptian and modern Japanese furigana); and to write grammatical elements such as verbal inflections which did not have dedicated logograms (similar to Japanese okurigana).
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A phonetic complement is a phonetic symbol used to disambiguate word characters (logograms) that have multiple readings, in mixed logographic- phonetic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Akkadian cuneiform, Japanese, and Mayan. Often they reenforce the communication of the ideogram by repeating the first or last syllable in the term. Written English has few logograms, primarily numerals, and therefore few phonetic complements. An example is the nd of 2nd 'second', which avoids ambiguity with 2 standing for the word 'two'.
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It is written from right to left, but by the time it had evolved into its child system, the Old Uyghur alphabet, it had been rotated 90 degrees, written vertically in columns from left to right. Voiced and voiceless fricatives are consistently not distinguished in the script. Aramaic logograms also appear in the script, remnants of adapting the Aramaic alphabet to the Sogdian language. These logograms are used mainly for functional words such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.
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Aztec or Nahuatl writing is a pre-Columbian writing system that combines ideographic writing with Nahuatl specific phonetic logograms and syllabic signs which was used in central Mexico by the Nahua people.
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The existence of logograms and syllabic signs are being documented and a phonetic aspect of the writing system has emerged, even though many of the syllabic characters have been documented since at least 1888 by Nuttall. There are conventional signs for syllables and logograms which act as word signs or for their rebus content. Logosyllabic writing appears on both painted and carved artifacts, such as the Tizoc Stone. However, instances of phonetic characters often appear within a significant artistic and pictorial context.
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In the Epic, ZU is also used as a logogram, ZU.AB, for Akkadian language "apsû",Parpola, 197l. The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Logograms and Their Readings, pp. 117-118, ZU.AB, p. 118.Parpola, 197l.
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An individual Big5 code does not always represent a complete semantic unit. The Big5 codes of logograms are always logograms, but codes in the "graphical characters" section are not always complete "graphical characters". What Big5 encodes are particular graphical representations of characters or part of characters that happen to fit in the space taken by two monospaced ASCII characters. This is a property of double-byte character sets as normally used in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) computing, and is not a unique problem of Big5.
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A word could be written phonetically even when a logogram for it existed (pitar could be or ), but logograms were nevertheless used very frequently in texts. Many huzvarishn were listed in the lexicon Frahang-i Pahlavig. The practice of using these logograms appears to have originated from the use of Aramaic in the chancelleries of the Achaemenid Empire.. Partly similar phenomena are found in the use of Sumerograms and Akkadograms in ancient Mesopotamia and the Hittite empire, and in the adaptation of Chinese writing to Japanese.
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Logographic scripts, or writing systems such as Chinese that do not use an alphabet but are composed principally of logograms, cannot produce pangrams in a literal sense (or at least, not pangrams of reasonable size). The total number of signs is large and imprecisely defined, so producing a text with every possible sign is practically impossible. However, various analogies to pangrams are feasible, including traditional pangrams in a romanization. In Japanese, although typical orthography uses kanji (logograms), pangrams can be made using every kana, or syllabic character.
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Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but by the 29th century BC also for phonetic elements. Around 2700 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian. About that time, Mesopotamian cuneiform became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. This script was adapted to another Mesopotamian language, the East Semitic Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian) around 2600 BC, and then to others such as Elamite, Hattian, Hurrian and Hittite.
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Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing () was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical chinese. This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities.
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Two languages appeared in the writing on the tablets: Sumerian, and a previously unknown language that used the Sumerian cuneiform script (Sumerian logograms or "Sumerograms") as a phonetic representation of the locally spoken Ebla language. The latter script was initially identified as proto-Canaanite by professor Giovanni Pettinato, who first deciphered the tablets, because it predated the Semitic languages of Canaan, like Ugaritic and Hebrew. Pettinato later retracted the designation and decided to call it simply "Eblaite", the name by which it is known today. The purely phonetic use of Sumerian logograms marks a momentous advance in the history of writing.
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Depending on the context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms, each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). (See the article Transliterating cuneiform languages.) Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri-spellings, after the logogram 'diri' which is written with the signs SI and A. The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word 'diri', not the separate component signs. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before a scholar publishes an important treatment of a text, the scholar will often arrange to collate the published transcription against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.
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Round- stylus and sharp-stylus writing were gradually replaced around 2700–2500 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 29th century BC. About 2600 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language. Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. From the 26th century BC, this script was adapted to the Akkadian language, and from there to others, such as Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
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Alphabets and syllabaries are distinct from logographies in that they use individual written characters to represent sounds directly. Such characters are called phonograms in linguistics. Unlike logograms, phonograms do not have any inherent meaning. Writing language in this way is called phonemic writing or orthographic writing.
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In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a fixed combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.
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It is also called the La Mojarra script and the Epi-Olmec script ('post-Olmec script'). Isthmian script is structurally similar to the Maya script, and like Maya uses one set of characters to represent logograms (or word units) and a second set to represent syllables.Lo.
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Not enough glyphs were recorded to write all Woleaian syllables this way, and it is not known if the script was fully standardized.It may have been expanded through the rebus principle when a writer found that convenient, or some of the extra syllables may have been logograms.
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The shapes of the letters derive from sand- drawing. It has distinct letters for NG and NGG, but otherwise corresponds closely to the Latin alphabet above, though capitals are seldom used, punctuation differs, there are digits for higher numbers and logograms for commonly traded commodities such as pig tusks.
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Inputting complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to a practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered.
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Two other uses of TUParpola, 197l. The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Logograms and Their Readings, pp. 117-8, p. 118, for TU & TU.MUŠEN.. in the Epic are as follows: "TU" is also the Akkadian language verb, erēbu, for English language "to enter", "to set", used in Tablet III and VII.
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It also has a sumerogrammic usage for TA, for example in the Epic of Gilgamesh, for Akkadian language "ultu", English language for from, or since,Parpola, 197l. The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Glossary, pp. 119-145, ultu, p. 144, and Glossary and Indices, Logograms and Their Readings, pp. 117-118.
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In its initial form, Bamum script was a pictographic mnemonic aid (proto-writing) of 500 to 600 characters. As Njoya revised the script, he introduced logograms (word symbols). The sixth version, completed by 1910, is a syllabary with 80 characters. It is also called a-ka-u-ku after its first four characters.
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Serendipity serendipity, volcano, Asian characters, English logograms, atom, water idioms, Anatomy, Avocado, Mark Twain 16\. Nature earth, geo, nat, aaron, navidad, terr, eco (oiko), bio, Copernicus, Galileo 17\. Leading duc, agog, pedagogy, crat, cracy, reg, pop 18\. Transportation I mov (mob), pilgrim, itinerary, taxi, mot, canoe, sail, sale, Ms. Hyperbole, horse-hippodrome again.
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Aztec was pictographic and ideographic proto-writing, augmented by phonetic rebuses. It also contained syllabic signs and logograms. There was no alphabet, but puns also contributed to recording sounds of the Aztec language. While some scholars have understood the system to not be considered a complete writing system, this is a changing topic.
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It formed a semi- alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" (), "king" () or "country" (). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by the early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to the 3rd millennium Sumerian script.
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By the mid-1970s, it had become increasingly clear to most that the Maya writing system was a logosyllabic one, a mixture of logograms and phonetic components that included a fully functional syllabary.See description of the script in Coe (1992, pp.262–265); Houston (1989, pp.33–42). See also the Maya script article.
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Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters (hànzì) into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e.
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This pocket-sized dictionary of Chinese characters uses simplified Chinese characters and pinyin romanization. The most recent Xinhua Zidian edition (the 11th) contains 3,300 compounds and includes over 13,000 logograms, including traditional Chinese characters and variant Chinese characters. Bopomofo is used as a supplement alongside Pinyin. Xinhua Zidian is divided into 189 "radicals" or "section headers" (DeFrancis 1984:291).
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These alphabetical scripts are part of Standard Zhuang. The Old Zhuang script, Sawndip, is a Chinese character–based writing system, similar to Vietnamese chữ nôm. Some Sawndip logograms were borrowed directly from Chinese, while others were created from the existing components of Chinese characters. Sawndip has been used for over one thousand years for various Zhuang dialects.
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Chinese characters are basically logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of generally agreed rules have been developed by custom. Minor variations exist between countries, but the basic principles remain the same, namely that writing characters should be economical, with the fewest hand movements to write the most strokes possible. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability.
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The decipherment and classification of Hieroglyphic Luwian was much more difficult. In the 1920s, there were a number of failed attempts. In the 1930s some individual logograms and syllabic signs were correctly identified. At this point the classification of the language was not yet clear and, since it was believed to be a form of Hittite, it was referred to as Hieroglyphic Hittite.
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English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille,"English Braille" normally refers to Grade 2. The more basic Grade 1 Braille, which is only used by learners, is specified as "English Braille, Grade 1" (Braille Through Remote Learning). is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms).
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Chinese characters (), also called as Hanzi or Han Characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese.Shieh (2011). "The Unified Phonetic Transcription for Teaching and Learning Chinese Languages" Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10: 355–369. They have been adapted to write other Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as kanji.
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The existence of similar glossaries from Akkadian times (explaining Sumerian logograms) led an Assyriologist, Erich Ebeling, to explain that many of the words in the Frahang were derived from Sumerian or Akkadian. This led to a number of "far-fetched interpretations,". which were then subsequently incorporated into a number of later interpretations, including those of Iranists, so effectively making even these unreliable.
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The original Big-5 only include CJK logograms from two lists "" (4808 characters) and "" (6343 characters), but not letters from people's names, place names, dialects, chemistry, biology, Japanese kana. As a result, many Big-5 supporting software include extensions to address the problems. The plethora of variations make UTF-8 or UTF-16 a more consistent code page for modern use.
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Property was regarded to belong to the ie rather than to individuals, and inheritance was strictly agnatic primogeniture. A woman (女) married the household (家) of her husband, hence the logograms for and . In the absence of sons, some households would adopt a to maintain the dynasty, a practice which continues in corporate Japan. Nearly all adoptions are of adult men.
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Close-up of the Behistun inscription An Old Persian inscription in Persepolis Old Persian texts were written from left to right in the syllabic Old Persian cuneiform script and had 36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms. The usage of logograms is not obligatory. The script was surprisingly Excerpt: "It remains unclear why the Persians did not take over the Mesopotamian system in earlier times, as the Elamites and other peoples of the Near East had, and, for that matter, why the Persians did not adopt the Aramaic consonantal script.." not a result of evolution of the script used in the nearby civilisation of Mesopotamia. Despite the fact that Old Persian was written in cuneiform script, the script was not a direct continuation of Mesopotamian tradition and in fact, according to Schmitt, was a "deliberate creation of the sixth century BCE".
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This in turn influenced the adoption of the name pahlavi (< parthawi, "of the Parthians") for their use of Aramaic script with logograms. The Sasanian Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Arsacids in the mid-3rd century CE, subsequently inherited/adopted the Parthian-mediated Aramaic-derived writing system for their own Middle Iranian ethnolect as well.Beyer. p. 28 n. 27; That particular Middle Iranian dialect, Middle Persian, i.e.
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It was also used for story-telling, oratory, various ceremonies, and by deaf people for ordinary daily use. In the late 1810s and early 1820s, the Cherokee syllabary was invented by the silversmith Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with logograms, before developing his system into a syllabary.
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The symbol of the language is written in , with the symbol for written inside the symbol for . The word symbols of The latter system, , was created by Jonathan Gabel. It is more elaborate and visually resembles the Mayan script. This non-linear system uses two separate methods to form words: logograms representing words and an alphasyllabary for writing the syllables (especially for proper names).
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Yakubovich 2010, pp. 68-73 The last dialect represents the vernacular of Hattusan scribes of the 14th–13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts. Compared to cuneiform Hittite, logograms (signs with a set symbolic value) are rare. Instead, most writing is done with the syllabic characters, where a single symbol stands for a vowel, or a consonant-vowel pair (either VC or CV).
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The Chinese logograms for peng and kun exemplify common radical-phonetic characters. Peng (鵬) combines the "bird radical" (鳥) with a peng (朋 "friend") phonetic, and kun combines the "fish radical" (魚) with a kun (昆 "progeny; insect") phonetic. Both the mythic Chinese Peng and Kun names involve word play. Peng (鵬) was anciently a variant Chinese character for feng (鳳) in fenghuang (鳳凰 "Chinese phoenix" ca.
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By the tenth century, 400,000 copies of some sutras and pictures were printed, and the Confucian classics were in print. A skilled printer could print up to 2,000 double-page sheets per day. Printing spread early to Korea and Japan, which also used Chinese logograms, but the technique was also used in Turpan and Vietnam using a number of other scripts. This technique then spread to Persia and Russia.
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In the case of Chinese, the phonetic element is built into the logogram itself; in Egyptian and Mayan, many glyphs are purely phonetic, whereas others function as either logograms or phonetic elements, depending on context. For this reason, many such scripts may be more properly referred to as logosyllabic or complex scripts; the terminology used is largely a product of custom in the field, and is to an extent arbitrary.
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The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Glossary and Indices, Logograms and Their Readings, pp. 117-18, p. 117. Some of the Amarna letters using the Sumerogram for ship, or boat, are Amarna letters: EA 86, EA 153, EA 149, and EA 245. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (chapter) (the Flood Story) uses the ship/boat Sumerogram; elsewhere Gilgamesh is taken by boat in other chapters of the Epic.
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In the following year, he resumed painting in oils on paper and fabric, and exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Perpetuating the spirit of Cobra, he employed the principle of nonspecialization, cherished by the group, creating logograms together with Dotremont. In 1981, he painted on assemblages of match boxes. Though he exhibited in 1949 as a member of Cobra, his first one-man show was mounted only in 1970 at the Dierickx gallery in Brussels.
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Most writing systems are not purely one type. The English writing system, for example, includes numerals and other logograms such as #, $, and &, and the written language often does not match well with the spoken one. As mentioned above, all logographic systems have phonetic components as well, whether along the lines of a syllabary, such as Chinese ("logo-syllabic"), or an abjad, as in Egyptian ("logo-consonantal"). Some scripts, however, are truly ambiguous.
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The Chinese Foundation for Digitization Technology (中文數位化技術推廣委員會) introduced Big5+ in 1997, which used over 20000 code points to incorporate all CJK logograms in Unicode 1.1. However, the extra code points exceeded the original Big-5 definition (Big5+ uses high byte values 81-FE and low byte values 40-7E and 80-FE), preventing it from being installed on Microsoft Windows without new codepage files.
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This fact, combined with frequent use of Akkadian and Sumerian words, as well as logograms, or signs representing whole words, to represent lexical items, often introduces considerable uncertainty as to the form of the original. However, phonetic syllable signs are present also, representing syllables of the form V, CV, VC, CVC, where V is "vowel" and C is "consonant." Hittite is divided into Old, Middle, and New (or Neo-). The dates are somewhat variable.
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Interpreting the Chu Silk Manuscript's brush-written Chinese characters is especially difficult. Some of these ancient logograms are illegible and some are missing in lacuna. Others are what Barnard (1981:181) calls "descendantless graphs" unidentified with standard characters, which "may reflect something of the Ch'u (written) "dialect" rather than more general characteristics of pre-Han character structures." Barnard (1973) provided the first English translation of the manuscript, followed by Li and Cook (1999).
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Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary Before the development of the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, Cherokee was a spoken language only. The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary.
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Hieroglyphs are ubiquitous and were written on every available surface, including the human body. The glyphs themselves are highly detailed, and particularly the logograms are deceivingly realistic. As a matter of fact, from an art-historical point of view, they should also be viewed as art motifs, and vice versa. Sculptors at Copan and Quirigua have consequently felt free to convert hieroglyphic elements and calendrical signs into animated, dramatic miniature scenes ('full figure glyphs').
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Max Loreau is interested in the aesthetics of the Renaissance before publishing the complete catalog of works by Jean Dubuffet. He became close to the members of the Cobra movement. He devotes various articles to painters like Guillaume Corneille or Asger Jorn, before drafting a more comprehensive study of the logograms by Christian Dotremont in 1975. He also worked with Pierre Alechinsky who helped him to publish one of his last texts, L'Épreuve.
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Miꞌkmaw hieroglyphic writing was a writing system and memory aid used by the Miꞌkmaq, a First Nations people of the east coast of Canada. The missionary- era glyphs were logograms, with phonetic elements used alongside (Schmidt & Marshall 1995), which included logographic, alphabetic, and ideographic information. They were derived from a pictograph and petroglyph tradition.Edwards, Brandan Frederick R. Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada before 1960.
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The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until the creation of his syllabary. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters provide a suitable method to write Cherokee.
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The Luwian language had a version, hieroglyphic Luwian, that read in boustrophedon style (most of the language was written down in cuneiform). The Hieroglyphic Luwian is read boustrophedonically, with the direction of any individual line pointing into the front of the animals or body parts constituting certain hieroglyphs. However, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs with their numerous ideograms and logograms, which show an easy directionality, the lineal direction of the text in hieroglyphic Luwian is harder to see.
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He was exposed to English literacy through his white father. His limited understanding of the Roman alphabet, including the ability to recognize the letters of his name, may have aided him in the creation of the Cherokee syllabary. When developing the written language, Sequoyah first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86)Sturtevant & Fogelson 2004, p. 337.
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Historically speaking, it was spelt , a fairly straightforward spelling for an abjad. However, had coalesced with ; had coalesced, in the spelling of certain words, with both and ; and had been reduced, in the spelling of certain words, to a form whose combination with was indistinguishable from a , which in turn had coalesced with . This meant that the same orthographic form that stood for could also be interpreted as (among many other possible readings). The logograms could also pose problems.
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In the second stage of elementary scribal education, students started learning words and logograms. They memorized and wrote out thematically organized lists of nouns (which later developed into the first-millennium lexical list UR₅.RA = hubullu). By memorizing this list, students learned Sumerian words for objects in different categories, including trees and wooden objects; reeds and reed objects; vessels and clay; hides and leather objects, metals and metal objects; types of animals and meat; stones and plants, etc.
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Lisu syllabary From 1924 to 1930, a Lisu farmer called Ngua-ze-bo (pronounced ; Chinese: ) invented the Lisu syllabary from Chinese script, Dongba script and Geba script. However, it looks more different from the Chinese script than Chu Nom and Sawndip (Zhuang logograms). Since Ngua-ze-bo initially carved his characters on bamboos, the syllabary is known as the Lisu Bamboo script (傈僳竹书). It has a total of 1250 glyphs and 880 characters.
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For example, 'rest' is composed of the characters for 'person' () and 'tree' (), with the intended idea of someone leaning against a tree, i.e. resting. # Radical- phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is (liáng), where the phonetic liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.
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In the model developed by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, the tokens were first reported on the clay envelopes, then on clay tablets and this led to the creation of the first written signs, which were pictograms, drawings which represent a physical object (logograms, one sign = one word).Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, 2 vol., Austin, 1992 ; Ead., How Writing Came About, Austin, 1996 But this is very contested because there is no obvious correspondence between the tokens and the pictograms that replaced them.
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Chinese characters are still actively used in South Korea today, mostly for signs, newspapers, books, and government documents. Chinese characters are also used within China to write non-Han languages. The largest non-Han group in China, the Zhuang, have for over 1300 years used Chinese characters. Despite both the introduction of an official alphabetic script in 1957 and lack of a corresponding official set of Chinese characters, more Zhuang people can read the Zhuang logograms than the alphabetic script.
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The Parthian language was rendered using the Pahlavi writing system, which had two essential characteristics: First, its script derived from Aramaic, the script (and language) of the Achaemenid chancellery (i.e. Imperial Aramaic). Second, it had a high incidence of Aramaic words, rendered as ideograms or logograms, that is, they were written Aramaic words but understood as Parthian ones (See Arsacid Pahlavi for details). The Parthian language was the language of the old Satrapy of Parthia and was used in the Arsacids courts.
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This was solved by the publication in 1991 of the standard for 16-bit Unicode, in development since 1987. Unicode maintained ASCII characters at the same code points for compatibility. As well as support for non-Latin scripts, Unicode provided code points for logograms such as Chinese characters and many specialist characters such as astrological and mathematical symbols. In 1996, Unicode 2.0 allowed code points greater than 16-bit; up to 20-bit, and 21-bit with an additional private use area.
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All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs () and a number which are ideographic () in origin, including compound ideographs (), but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds (). The other categories in the traditional system of classification are rebus or phonetic loan characters () and "derivative cognates" (). Modern scholars have proposed various revised systems, rejecting some of the traditional categories.
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It is an official language of China, similar to one of the national languages of Taiwan (Taiwanese Mandarin) and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The written form of the standard language (, Zhōngwén), based on the logograms known as Chinese characters (/, Hànzì), is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. The earliest Chinese written records are Shang dynasty-era oracle inscriptions, which can be traced back to 1250 BCE.
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In logographic writing systems, glyphs represent words or morphemes (meaningful components of words, as in mean-ing- ful), rather than phonetic elements. Note that no logographic script is composed solely of logograms. All contain graphemes that represent phonetic (sound-based) elements as well. These phonetic elements may be used on their own (to represent, for example, grammatical inflections or foreign words), or may serve as phonetic complements to a logogram (used to specify the sound of a logogram that might otherwise represent more than one word).
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These three Zhuang logograms (𮬭鴓) from the Sawndip Sawdenj (the first two of which were added to Unicode 10.0 in June 2017) are formed as follows: the components 力, 六 and 必 respectively indicate the sound, and the components 子, 鳥 and 鳥 indicate the meaning. " roegbit", literally "child bird- duck", means "wild duckling". Sawndip is made up of a combination of Chinese characters, Chinese-like characters, and other symbols. Like Chinese it can be written horizontally from left to right, or vertically from right to left.
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The only attested example is a paper by Louis Malcolm, a British officer who served in Cameroon in World War I. This was published without the characters in 1921, and the manuscript with characters was deposited in the library of Cambridge University. This was published in full in Tuchscherer (1999). A hundred characters are recorded, though it is thought the script had several hundred more. These include logograms, some used phonetically, syllabograms (for CV and CVC syllables), as well as independent consonants and vowels.
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In both Inscriptional and Book Pahlavi, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, were spelled according to their Aramaic equivalents, which were used as logograms. For example, the word for "dog" was written as (Aramaic kalbā) but pronounced sag; and the word for "bread" would be written as Aramaic (laḥmā) but understood as the sign for Iranian nān. These words were known as huzvārishn. Such a logogram could also be followed by letters expressing parts of the Persian word phonetically, e.g.
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Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, was the writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BCE in San Bartolo, Guatemala. Maya writing was in continuous use throughout Mesoamerica until the Spanish conquest of the Maya in the 16th and 17th centuries. Maya writing used logograms complemented with a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing.
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The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called one, ichi or wāḥid by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to a significant extent in writing even if they do not write in standard Chinese.
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Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while the Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient.
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In the motion picture Contact (1997), SETI astronomers receive a radio transmission from space that has a Lincos- like dictionary embedded in the message. In the 2016 sci-fi blockbuster film, Arrival, Stephen Wolfram and his son were consulted by film production to help analyze symbols known as logograms that ultimately served as the basis for the alien language utilized throughout the film. Wolfram's personal copy of Lincos was present on the film's set. In the Stanisław Lem novel His Master's Voice, Lincos is mentioned together with Loglan.
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W. Sloper, Thạc Cán Lê Higher Education in Vietnam: Change and Response 1995 Page 45 "All teaching materials are written in Han, Chinese classical characters known as chu nho. From about the thirteenth century a Vietnamese system of writing, chu nom or simply nom, was developed. ... chu nho was used for official business and scholarship, while chu nom was used for popular literature." Though technically different from chữ Hán, it is simplest to think of it as a derivation of chữ Hán—with modifications thereof as well as new Vietnamese-coined logograms.
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His pioneering Contribution au Dictionnaire sumérien–assyrien, Paris 1905–1907, turns out to provide the foundation for P. Anton Deimel's 1934 Sumerisch-Akkadisches Glossar (vol. III of Deimel's 4-volume Sumerisches Lexikon). In 1908, Stephen Herbert Langdon summarized the rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca, a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud, in an article "Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies", which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable.
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The point is briefly made by Stephen D. Cole, in a letter "Eblaite in Sumerian Script" in The Biblical Archaeologist 40.2 (May 1977:49). From the earlier system developed by Sumerian scribes, employing a mixed use of logograms and phonetic signs, the scribes at Ebla employed a reduced number of signs from the existing systems entirely phonetically, both the earliest example of transcription (rendering sounds in a system invented for another language) and a major simplifying step towards "reader friendliness" that would enable a wider spread of literacy in palace, temple and merchant contexts.
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In certain cases compound words and set phrases may be contracted into single characters. Some of these can be considered logograms, where characters represent whole words rather than syllable-morphemes, though these are generally instead considered ligatures or abbreviations (similar to scribal abbreviations, such as & for "et"), and as non-standard. These do see use, particularly in handwriting or decoration, but also in some cases in print. In Chinese, these ligatures are called héwén (), héshū () or hétǐzì (), and in the special case of combining two characters, these are known as "two-syllable Chinese characters" (, ).
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As a strong grasp of logograms is needed to study the Japanese language (whose writing system includes kanji, or modified Chinese characters), only students who have previously taken the Chinese language as a PSLE subject are allowed to take the Japanese language course, with exceptions. Higher Malay is a continuation of previous Malay knowledge from primary school, so only students who took Malay as a PSLE subject are eligible for Higher Malay. Non-Malay students, or students who did not take Malay as a PSLE subject, can take the Malay Special Programme.
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Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian. The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BC (early Shang Dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c.
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Cuneiform writing (Neoassyrian script) (1 = Logogram (LG) "mix"/syllabogram (SG) ', 2 = LG "moat", 3 = SG ', 4 = SG , , , , 5 = SG kam, 6 = SG im, 7 = SG bir) Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c. 2500 BC. It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes, the adapted cuneiform script could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms (i.e., picture-based characters representing entire words), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, or (d) phonetic complements.
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However, in Akkadian the script practically became a fully fledged syllabic script, and the original logographic nature of cuneiform became secondary, though logograms for frequent words such as 'god' and 'temple' continued to be used. For this reason, the sign AN can on the one hand be a logogram for the word ilum ('god') and on the other signify the god Anu or even the syllable -an-. Additionally, this sign was used as a determinative for divine names. Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a well- defined phonetic value.
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Esperanto is written in a Latin-script alphabet of twenty-eight letters, with upper and lower case. This is supplemented by punctuation marks and by various logograms, such as the digits 0–9, currency signs such as $, and mathematical symbols. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, declared a principle of "one letter, one sound", though this general guideline is not strictly followed.Kalocsay & Waringhien, Plena analiza gramatiko, §17 Twenty-two of the letters are identical in form to letters of the English alphabet (q, w, x, and y being omitted).
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Frahang-ī Pahlavīg (Middle Persian: 𐭯𐭥𐭧𐭭𐭢 𐭯𐭧𐭫𐭥𐭩𐭪 "Pahlavi dictionary") is the title of an anonymous dictionary of unknown date of (mostly) Aramaic logograms with Middle Persian translations (in Pahlavi script) and transliterations (in Pazend script).. The glossary was previously known to Indian Zoroastrians (the Parsis) as the mna-xvatay (traditionally pronounced mona khoda), a name derived from the first two words of the first entry/lemma.. The Frahang-i Pahlavig should not be confused with the Frahang-i Oim-evak, which is a glossary of Avestan language terms.
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Ithkuil uses a base 100 numeral system with roots for the numbers 1 to 10, and a stem- specific derivative suffix used with a number root to add a multiple of 10, providing the numerals up to 99. Ithkuil did not originally use the concept of zero. Numbers greater than 100 are expressed periphrastically in speech, whereas a special numerical script had logograms for the numbers 1 to 100 and exponential powers of 100. On 27 March 2015 Quijada released a mathematical sublanguage using a dozenal number system.
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There are also seals and sealings. A sealing is a counter-relief impression of hieroglyphic signs carved or cast in relief on a seal. The resulting signature can be stamped or rolled onto a soft material, such as sealing wax. The HLuwian writing system contains about 500 signs, 225 of which are logograms, and the rest purely functional determinatives and syllabograms, representing syllables of the form V, CV, or rarely CVCV.. HLuwian texts appear as early as the 14th century BC in names and titles on seals and sealings at Hattusa.
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Morse code for non-Latin alphabets, such as Cyrillic or Arabic script, is achieved by constructing a character encoding for the alphabet in question using the same, or nearly the same code points as used in the Latin alphabet. Syllabaries, such as Japanese katakana, are also handled this way (Wabun code). The alternative of adding more code points to Morse code for each new character would result in code transmissions being very long in some languages. Languages that use logograms are more difficult to handle due to the much larger number of characters required.
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10 The most important find was a fist-sized ceramic cylinder seal, likely used to print cloth. When rolled out, the seal shows two speech scrolls emanating from a bird, followed directly by a number of design elements enframing what has been interpreted as logograms for “king (sideways U shape),” "3 (three dots, according to the Mesoamerican bar and dots numbering system),” and “Ajaw (from the sacred 260-day calendar)", a designation used for both a calendar date and, in keeping with Mesoamerican custom, the name of an Olmec ruler.
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Like Gregg shorthand, Pitman shorthand is phonemic: with the exception of abbreviated shapes called logograms, the forms represent the sounds of the English word, rather than its spelling or meaning. Unlike Gregg it is also partly featural, in that pairs of consonsant phonemes distinguished only by voice are notated with strokes differing only in thickness.Daniels, Peter T. "Shorthand", in Daniels, Peter T. and Bright, William, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, p. 818. . There are twenty-four consonants that can be represented in Pitman's shorthand, twelve vowels and four diphthongs.
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The majority of the hieroglyphic inscriptions derive from the 12th to 7th centuries BC, after the fall of the Hittite empire. Another source of Luwian are the hieroglyphic seals which date from the 16th to the 7th centuries BC. Seals from the time of the Hittite empire are often digraphic, written in both cuneiform and hieroglyphics. However, the seals nearly always are limited to logograms. The absence of the syllabic symbols from the seals makes it impossible to determine the pronunciation of names and titles that appear on them, or even to make a certain attribution of the text to a specific language.
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The principal types of graphemes are logograms (more accurately termed morphogramsJoyce, T. (2011), The significance of the morphographic principle for the classification of writing systems, Written Language and Literacy 14:1, pp. 58–81. ), which represent words or morphemes (for example Chinese characters, the ampersand "&" representing the word and, Arabic numerals); syllabic characters, representing syllables (as in Japanese kana); and alphabetic letters, corresponding roughly to phonemes (see next section). For a full discussion of the different types, see . There are additional graphemic components used in writing, such as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, word dividers such as the space, and other typographic symbols.
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In 2016, McGill University Linguistics Professor, Jessica Coon, spoke with Business Insider about how 2016 sci-fi blockbuster, Arrival, properly portrayed how humans might actually communicate with aliens. To create this language, film producers consulted with Wolfram Research Founder and CEO, Stephen Wolfram – creator of the computer programming language known as the Wolfram Language – and his son, Christopher. Together, they helped analyze approximately 100 logograms that ultimately served as the basis for the alien language utilized throughout the film. This work, along with many other thoughts with regard to artificial intelligence communication has been documented in an interview published by Space.com.
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Logographic writing systems (such as Chinese characters and Cuneiform) differ significantly from alphabetic systems in that the graphemes of a logographic system are logograms; that is, written characters represent meaning (morphemes), rather than sounds (phonemes). As a result, logographic systems require a comparatively large number of unique characters. This means that development of reading and writing skills in logographic systems depends more heavily on visual memorization than in alphabetic systems. Thus dyslexics, who often rely on grapheme memorization to cope with phonological awareness deficits, may show reduced difficulty in acquiring a language which uses a logographic system.
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Moreover, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, continued to written as Aramaic "words" even when writing Middle Iranian languages. In time, in Iranian usage, these Aramaic "words" became disassociated from the Aramaic language and came to be understood as signs (i.e. logograms), much like the sign is read as "and" in English and the original Latin et is now no longer obvious. Under the early third-century BCE Parthian Empire, whose government used Koine Greek but whose native language was Parthian, the Parthian language and the Aramaic-derived writing system used for Parthian both gained prestige.
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Zhuang characters or Sawndip (), are logograms derived from Chinese characters and used by the Zhuang people of Guangxi and Yunnan, China to write the Zhuang languages for more than one thousand years. The script is not only used by the Zhuang but also by the closely related Bouyei in Guizhou, China and Tay in Vietnam and Nùng, in Yunnan, China and Vietnam. Sawndip (Sawndip: 𭨡𮄫) is a Zhuang word that means "immature characters". The Zhuang word for Chinese characters used in the Chinese language is sawgun (Sawndip: 𭨡倱; "characters of the Han"); gun is the Zhuang term for the Han Chinese.
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Christian Dotremont, (12 December 1922 – 20 August 1979), was a Belgian painter and poet who was born in Tervuren, Belgium. He was a founding member of the Revolutionary Surrealist Group (1946) and he also founded COBRA together with Danish artist Asger Jorn.Stewart Home, (1988) The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War London : Unpopular Books and Aporia Press In this capacity he was responsible for bringing Henri Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne (1946) to the group's attention. He later became well known for his painted poems (French: Peinture mots), which he called logograms.
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Moreover, many common words, including even pronouns, particles, numerals, and auxiliaries, continued to written as Aramaic "words" even when writing Middle Iranian languages. In time, in Iranian usage, these Aramaic "words" became disassociated from the Aramaic language and came to be understood as signs (i.e. logograms), much like the symbol '&' is read as "and" in English and the original Latin et is now no longer obvious. Under the early 3rd-century BC Parthians Arsacids, whose government used Greek but whose native language was Parthian, the Parthian language and its Aramaic-derived writing system both gained prestige.
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Whilst according to some semi- official sources "In Guangxi, compulsory education is bilingual in Zhuang and Chinese, with a focus on early Zhuang literacy," only a small percentage of schools teach written Zhuang. Zhuang has been written using logograms based on Chinese characters ("Sawndip") for over 1,000 years. Standard Zhuang, the official alphabetical script, was introduced in 1957, and in 1982 the Cyrillic letters were changed to Latin letters. However, the traditional character- based script is more commonly used in less formal domains and in June 2017 just over one thousand of these characters were added in Unicode 10.0 .
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The Maya writing system was a combination of phonetic syllabic symbols and logograms—that is, it was a logosyllabic writing system. It is the only pre-Columbian writing system known to represent completely the spoken language of its community. In total, the script has more than one thousand different glyphs, although a few are variations of the same sign or meaning, and many appear only rarely or are confined to particular localities. At any one time, no more than about five hundred glyphs were in use, some two hundred of which (including variations) had a phonetic or syllabic interpretation.
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Stuart is best known for his discoveries on the nature of Maya hieroglyphic writing from the 1980s to the present. By 1985 scholars had already generally recognized that there were two types of signs in the script: logograms (word signs) and syllables (consonant-vowel or CV). However, only a limited amount of Maya texts could be read in their original language, Classic Mayan, due to an imprecise understanding of the visual nature of the script, especially the ways signs formed and combined. Stuart demonstrated that signs could have a great many variants and forms, all visually distinct yet functionally equivalent.
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According to Arika Okrent, in the last thousand years, more than 900 languages have been invented, often by individuals who believed they had a universal solution for global, cross-cultural communication. Most attempts at creating a new language failed due to overly-ambitious goals, or eccentricities of their inventor. Many attempts have been based on pictograms or logograms, including iConji and the following. Of all the recently invented pictographic systems, Blissymbolics is the most successful to date. It is used to assist communications-challenged individuals, providing them a structured means by which they may convey concepts, and more recently, providing a “point and click” software interface.
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The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) is a standard set of characters defined by the International Standard ISO/IEC 10646, Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (plus amendments to that standard), which is the basis of many character encodings. The latest version contains over 136,000 abstract characters, each identified by an unambiguous name and an integer number called its code point. This ISO/IEC 10646 standard is maintained in conjunction with The Unicode Standard ("Unicode"), and they are code-for-code identical. Characters (letters, numbers, symbols, ideograms, logograms, etc.) from the many languages, scripts, and traditions of the world are represented in the UCS with unique code points.
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Traces of Middle Persian are found in remnants of Sasanian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri, coins and seals, fragments of Manichaean writings, and treatises and Zoroastrian books from the Sasanian era, as well as in the post- Sasanian Zoroastrian variant of the language sometimes known as Pahlavi, which originally referred to the Pahlavi scripts,See also Omniglot.com's page on Middle Persian scripts and that was also the preferred writing system for several other Middle Iranian languages. Aside from the Aramaic alphabet- derived Pahlavi script,, p. 14. Zoroastrian Middle Persian was occasionally also written in Pazend, a system derived from the Avestan alphabet that, unlike Pahlavi, indicated vowels and did not employ logograms.
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Like all the writing systems employed for Middle Iranian languages, the Sogdian alphabet ultimately derives from the Aramaic alphabet. Like its close relatives, the Pahlavi scripts, written Sogdian contains many logograms or ideograms, which were Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones. The Sogdian script is the direct ancestor of the Old Uyghur alphabet, itself the forerunner of the Traditional Mongolian alphabet. As in other writing systems descended from the Proto-Sinaitic script, there are no special signs for vowels. As in the parent Aramaic system, the consonantal signs ’ y w can be used as matres lectionis for the long vowels [a: i: u:] respectively.
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Using a smaller number of symbols than large script, small script was less complex, yet still "able to record any word." While small- script inscriptions employed some logograms as well, most words in small script were made using a blocked system reminiscent of the later Hangul writing of Korea, meaning that a word is represented by one group (square block) composed of several glyphs with individual phonetic meanings (somewhat similar to the jamo units of Hangul). Unlike Hangul's jamo, a Khitan phonetic symbol could represent not just a single vowel or consonant, but a consonant- vowel or vowel-consonant pair as well.Kane (1989), p. 15.
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Literature in the territory of present-day Honduras dates back more than fifteen hundred years, it was developed by the Mayan civilization in the city of Copán, the Mayan writing of our ancestors that used logograms and syllabic glyphs, the Mayan literature is found preserved in the stelae, pyramids and temples in Copán. The city of Copán houses the most informative pyramid in America, the hieroglyphic pyramid that has more than 2,500 glyphs. Among the most notable writers are, Lucila Gamero de Medina, Froylan Turcios, Ramón Amaya Amador, Juan Pablo Suazo Euceda, Marco Antonio Rosa, Roberto Sosa, Julio Escoto, Eduardo Bähr, Amanda Castro, Javier Abril Espinoza, Teófilo Trejo, and Roberto Quesada.
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Zhuang Sawndip manuscript the 81 symbols of the Poya 坡芽 Song Book used by Zhuang women in Funing County, Yunnan, China. The Zhuang languages have been written in the ancient Zhuang script, Sawndip, for over a thousand years, and possibly Sawgoek previous to that. Sawndip is a Chinese character-based system of writing, similar to Vietnamese chữ nôm; some sawndip logograms were borrowed directly from Han characters, whereas others were original characters created from the components of Chinese characters. It is used for writing songs about every aspect of life, including in more recent times encouraging people to follow official family planning policy.
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A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, known as the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing by approximately 500 years. It is thought to be Olmec. Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and the only one to be deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscription identified as Maya dates to the 3rd century BC. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs, somewhat similar in function to modern Japanese writing.
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In the early days of cuneiform decipherment, the reading of proper names presented the greatest difficulties. However, there is now a better understanding of the principles behind the formation and the pronunciation of the thousands of names found in historical records, business documents, votive inscriptions, literary productions, and legal documents. The primary challenge was posed by the characteristic use of old Sumerian non-phonetic logograms in other languages that had different pronunciations for the same symbols. Until the exact phonetic reading of many names was determined through parallel passages or explanatory lists, scholars remained in doubt or had recourse to conjectural or provisional readings.
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Madrid Codex The Maya writing system consists of about 1000 distinct characters or hieroglyphs ('glyphs'), and like many ancient writing systems is a mixture of syllabic signs and logograms. This script was in use from the 3rd century BCE until shortly after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. As of now (2019), a considerable proportion of the characters has a reading, but their meaning and configuration as a text is not always understood. The books were folded and consisted of bark paper or leather leaves with an adhesive stucco layer on which to write; they were protected by jaguar skin covers and, perhaps, wooden boards.
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The crucial importance of divination is suggested by the fact that the general Yucatec word for 'priest' (ah k'in) referred more specifically to the counting of the days. K'iche' daykeepers use puns to help remember and inform the meanings of the days. Divinatory techniques include the throwing and counting of seeds, crystals, and beans, and in the past also – apart from the count – gazing in a magical mirror (scrying), and reading the signs given by birds (auguries); during the Classic period, pictures of such birds were used as logograms for the larger time periods. The mantic calendar has proven to be particularly resistant to the onslaughts of time.
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Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds). Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet (or "abjad"). This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been a significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write a Semitic language).
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Following the same principle, phonetic signs were created (phonograms, one sign = one sound). For example, 'arrow' was pronounced as TI in Sumerian, so the sign for 'arrow' could be used to indicate the sound [ti]). At the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, the fundamental principles of Mesopotamian writing—the association of logograms and phonograms—had been put in place. Writing was then able to record grammatical elements of the language and thus to record complete phrases, a possibility which was not properly exploited until some centuries later.For a quick representation of this tradition account, see J. Bottéro, « De l'aide-mémoire à l'écriture », dans Mésopotamie, l'Écriture, la Raison et les Dieux, Paris, 1997, pp. 132–166.
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Nsibidi (also known as nsibiri, nchibiddi or nchibiddy) is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria that are apparently pictograms, though there have been suggestions that some are logograms or syllabograms. Early forms appeared on excavated pottery as well as what are most likely ceramic stools and headrests from the Calabar region with a range of dates from at least 400 AD (and possibly earlier), to 1400 AD. Nsibidi was used to decorate the skin, calabashes, sculptures, and clothing items, as well as to communicate messages on houses. There are thousands of nsibidi symbols, of which over 500 have been recorded. They were once taught in a school to children.
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Her primary objective with the Macintosh was to humanize it, make it seem less like a machine, and give it "a smile". She intended to bring "an artist's sensibility to a world that had been the exclusive domain of engineers and programmers" and "hoped to help counter the stereotypical image of computers as cold and intimidating". Her Macintosh icons were inspired by many sources such as art history, wacky gadgets, pirate lore, Japanese logograms, and forgotten hieroglyphics. On the Mac keyboard, her concept for the command symbol was taken from the Saint Hannes cross, which is a symbol for a place of cultural interest used by Scandinavians of the 1960s such as at Swedish campgrounds.
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The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700–2000 BC by writing using a wedge- shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 2800 BC. About 2600 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language.
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A grapheme is a specific base unit of a writing system. Graphemes are the minimally significant elements which taken together comprise the set of "building blocks" out of which texts made up of one or more writing systems may be constructed, along with rules of correspondence and use. The concept is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. For example, in the Latin-based writing system of standard contemporary English, examples of graphemes include the majuscule and minuscule forms of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet (corresponding to various phonemes), marks of punctuation (mostly non-phonemic), and a few other symbols such as those for numerals (logograms for numbers).
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In 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole 12-dot symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, Braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions, and even logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand.
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Detail showing glyphs from the Epi-Olmec script dating from the 2nd century CE La Mojarra Stela 1 Mesoamerica is one of the relatively few places in the world where writing has developed independently throughout history. The Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are logosyllabic combining the use of logograms with a syllabary, and they are often called hieroglyphic scripts. Five or six different scripts have been documented in Mesoamerica but archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was earliest and hence the forebear from which the others developed. Candidates for being the first writing system of the Americas are Zapotec writing, the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script or the scripts of the Izapan culture.
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One of the earliest examples of the Mesoamerican writing systems, the Epi-Olmec script on the La Mojarra Stela 1 dated to around 150 CE. Mesoamerica is one of the five places in the world where writing has developed independently. The Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are logosyllabic combining the use of logograms with a syllabary, and they are often called hieroglyphic scripts. Five or six different scripts have been documented in Mesoamerica, but archaeological dating methods, and a certain degree of self-interest, create difficulties in establishing priority and thus the forebear from which the others developed. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and therefore the most widely known, is the classic Maya script.
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A stone slab with 3,000-year-old writing, the Cascajal Block, was discovered in the Mexican state of Veracruz, and is an example of the oldest script in the Western Hemisphere, preceding the oldest Zapotec writing dated to about 500 BC. Of several pre-Columbian scripts in Mesoamerica, the one that appears to have been best developed, and has been fully deciphered, is the Maya script. The earliest inscriptions which are identifiably Maya date to the 3rd century BC, and writing was in continuous use until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century AD. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs: a combination somewhat similar to modern Japanese writing.
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A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets). By 2700 BC, Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
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However, since the meaning is inherent to the symbol, the same logographic system can theoretically be used to represent different languages. In practice, the ability to communicate across languages only works for the closely related varieties of Chinese, as differences in syntax reduce the crosslinguistic portability of a given logographic system. Japanese uses Chinese logograms extensively in its writing systems, with most of the symbols carrying the same or similar meanings. However, the grammatical differences between Japanese and Chinese are significant enough that a long Chinese text is not readily understandable to a Japanese reader without any knowledge of basic Chinese grammar, though short and concise phrases such as those on signs and newspaper headlines are much easier to comprehend.
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The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers.
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Unlike languages that use alphabets to indicate their pronunciation, Chinese characters have developed from logograms that do not always give hints to their pronunciation. Although the written characters have remained relatively consistent for the last two thousand years, the pronunciation and grammar in different regions have developed to an extent that the varieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible. As a series of migration to the south throughout the history, the regional languages of the south, including Gan, Xiang, Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka often show traces of Old Chinese or Middle Chinese. From the Ming dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the dialect spoken in Beijing has had the most prestige among other varieties.
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The recognition of the principles behind graphic variation and structure helped lead to a number of breakthroughs. Stuart proposed the decipherments of many new syllables and logograms in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn provided a more firm basis for a new wave of linguistic analyses of Maya texts during the 1990s and early 2000s. Stuart has also contributed a number of studies of Maya art, history and religion, especially at the sites of Copán, Palenque, Tikal, La Corona, San Bartolo and Xultun. in the late 1990s he produced a new interpretation of the history surrounding the Teotihuacan's "arrival" to the Maya area in 378 CE, proposing this was a military overthrow of the local Tikal king, and the establishment of a new political order.
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Before the advance of Islam in Transoxiana (early 8th century), Khwarezmian was written in a script close to that of Sogdian and Pahlavi with its roots in the imperial Aramaic script. From the few surviving examples of this script on coins and artifacts, it has been observed that written Khwarezmian included Aramaic logograms or ideograms, that is Aramaic words written to represent native spoken ones e.g. 𐡔𐡍𐡕 (ŠNT) for سرذ, sarδ, "year", 𐡍𐡐𐡔𐡉 (NPŠY) for خداك, xudāk, "self" and 𐡌𐡋𐡊𐡀 (MLK') for اى شاه, ī šah, "the king". After the advance of Islam, Khwarezmian was written using an adapted version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet with a few extra signs to reflect specific Khwarezmian sounds, such as the letter څ which represents /ts/ and /dz/, as in the traditional Pashto orthography.
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An example of Nahuatl writing of three place names The Aztecs did not have a fully developed writing system like the Maya, however like the Maya and Zapotec, they did use a writing system that combined logographic signs with phonetic syllable signs. Logograms would, for example, be the use of an image of a mountain to signify the word tepetl, "mountain", whereas a phonetic syllable sign would be the use of an image of a tooth tlantli to signify the syllable tla in words unrelated to teeth. The combination of these principles allowed the Aztecs to represent the sounds of names of persons and places. Narratives tended to be represented through sequences of images, using various iconographic conventions such as footprints to show paths, temples on fire to show conquest events, etc.
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Following the overthrow of the Seleucids, the Parthian Arsacids—who considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Achaemenids—adopted the manner, customs and government of the Persian court of two centuries previously. Among the many practices so adopted was the use of the Aramaic language ("Imperial Aramaic") that together with Aramaic script served as the language of the chancellery. By the end of the Arsacid era, the written Aramaic words had come to be understood as logograms, as explained above. The use of Pahlavi gained popularity following its adoption as the language/script of the commentaries (Zend) on the Avesta.. Propagated by the priesthood, who were not only considered to be transmitters of all knowledge but were also instrumental in government, the use of Pahlavi eventually reached all corners of the Parthian Arsacid empire.
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In the winter of 1905, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda Petrie (née Urlin) were conducting a series of archaeological excavations in the Sinai Peninsula. During a dig at Serabit el- Khadim, an extremely lucrative turquoise mine used during between the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasty and again between the Eighteenth and mid-Twentieth Dynasty, Sir Petrie discovered a series of inscriptions at the site's massive invocative temple to Hathor, as well as some fragmentary inscriptions in the mines themselves. Petrie immediately recognized hieroglyphic characters in the inscriptions, but upon closer inspection realized the script was wholly alphabetic and not the combination of logograms and syllabics as Egyptian script proper. He thus assumed that the script showed a script that the turquoise miners had devised themselves, using linear signs that they had borrowed from hieroglyphics.
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2500 – 2000 BC. Finds in the palaces include a small sculpture made out of precious materials, black stones and gold. Other artifacts included wood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl and composite statues created from colored stones. A silver bowl bearing king Immeya's name was recovered from the "Tomb of the Lord of the Goats", together with Egyptian jewels and an Egyptian ceremonial mace presented by pharaoh Hotepibre. About 17,000 cuneiform tablet fragments were discovered; when put together, they constitute 2,500 complete tablets, making the archive of Ebla one of the biggest from the third millennium BC. About 80% of the tablets are written using the usual Sumerian combination of logograms and phonetic signs, while the others exhibited an innovative, purely phonetic representation using Sumerian cuneiform of a previously unknown Semitic language, which was called "Eblaite".
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Mediated by scribes that had been trained in the language, highly standardized written Aramaic (in its Achaemenid form called Imperial Aramaic) progressively also become the lingua franca of trade and commerce throughout the Achaemenid territories, which extended as far east as the Indus valley. (That use of written Aramaic subsequently led to the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet and—as logograms—some Aramaic vocabulary in the Pahlavi scripts, which were used by several Middle Iranian languages, including Parthian, Middle Persian, Sogdian, and Khwarazmian). Aramaic's long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the development of many divergent varieties, which are sometimes considered dialects, though they have become distinct enough over time that they are now sometimes considered as separate languages. Therefore, there is not one singular, static Aramaic language; each time and place rather has had its own variation.
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However, because of the high incidence of logograms derived from Aramaic words, the Pahlavi script is far from always phonetic; and even when it is phonetic, it may have more than one transliterational symbol per sign, because certain originally different Aramaic letters have merged into identical graphic forms – especially in the Book Pahlavi variety. (For a review of the transliteration problems of Pahlavi, see Henning.) In addition to this, during much of its later history, Pahlavi orthography was characterized by historical or archaizing spellings. Most notably, it continued to reflect the pronunciation that preceded the widespread Iranian lenition processes, whereby postvocalic voiceless stops and affricates had become voiced, and voiced stops had become semivowels. Similarly, certain words continued to be spelt with postvocalic and even after the consonants had been debuccalized to in the living language.
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The personal names from the Sumerian city of Kish show an East Semitic nature and reveals that the city population had a strong Semitic component from the dawn of recorded history, Gelb consider Kish to be the center of this civilization, hence the naming. The similarities included the using of a writing system that contained non-Sumerian logograms, the use of the same system in naming the months of the year, dating by regnal years and a similar measuring system among many other similarities. However Gelb doesn't assume the existence of a single authority ruling those lands as each city had its own monarchical system, in addition to some linguistic differences for while the languages of Mari and Ebla were closely related, Kish represented an independent East Semitic linguistic entity that spoke a dialect (Kishite), different from both pre-Sargonic Akkadian and the Ebla-Mari language. The Kish civilisation is considered to end with the rise of the Akkadian empire in the 24th century BC.
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In the domain of science, Leibniz aimed for his characteristica to form diagrams or pictures, depicting any system at any scale, and understood by all regardless of native language. Leibniz wrote: P. P. Weiner raised an example of a large scale application of Leibniz's characteristica to climatic science. A weather-forecaster invented by Athanasius Kircher "interested Leibniz in connection with his own attempts to invent a universal language" (1940). Leibniz talked about his dream of a universal scientific language at the very dawn of his career, as follows: Nicholas Rescher, reviewing Cohen's 1954 article, wrote that: Near the end of his life, Leibniz wrote that combining metaphysics with mathematics and science through a universal character would require creating what he called: The universal "representation" of knowledge would therefore combine lines and points with "a kind of pictures" (pictographs or logograms) to be manipulated by means of his calculus ratiocinator. He hoped his pictorial algebra would advance the scientific treatment of qualitative phenomena, thereby constituting "that science in which are treated the forms or formulas of things in general, that is, quality in general" (On Universal Synthesis and Analysis, 1679, in Loemker 1969: 233).
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Various theories have been suggested to account for the apparent lack of a Jurchen small script in the extant corpus of monumental inscriptions and manuscript texts. Daniel Kane has suggested that the large and small Jurchen scripts are points on a single script continuum: the large script was the earliest form of the Jurchen script, as represented in the manuscript Jurchen Character Book (Nǚzhēn Zìshū 女真字書) that was discovered in Xi'an in 1979; and the small script was the later form of the Jurchen script, as represented on the Monument recording the names of successful candidates for the degree of jinshi (Nüzhen jinshi timing bei 女真進士題名碑) and in the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary. The earlier and later forms of the script use basically the same set of characters, but whereas the characters in the Jurchen Character Book are largely logographic is nature, many of the characters in the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary and monumental inscriptions have developed a phonetic function, and can thus be used to express grammatical endings. Kane considers the "large script" to refer to characters used as logograms, and the "small script" to refer to character used as phonograms.
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