Ideograph
- Date: 1838
Definitions
- 1 : a picture or symbol used in a system of writing to represent a thing or an idea but not a particular word or phrase for it; especially : one that represents not the object pictured but some thing or idea that the object pictured is supposed to suggest
- 2 : logogram
Description
An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφω grafo "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signs, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and formal languages, mathematical notation, logic, UML), which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. Other examples include the Blissymbols, Nsibidi, used by the Igbo and Ekpe in West Africa, Emoticons and pictographs as used by the Sioux and Ojibwa.
Terminology
The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographs in writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and (incorrectly) Chinese characters.
In the history of writing symbols proceeded from ideographic (e.g. an icon of a bull's head in a list inventory, denoting that the following numeral refers to head of cattle) to logographic (an icon of a bull denoting the Semitic word ʾālep "ox"), to phonetic (the bull's head used as a symbol in rebus writing, indicating the glottal stop at the beginning of the word for "ox", viz. the letter Aleph). Bronze Age writing systems used a combination of these applications, and many signs in hieroglyphic as well as in cuneiform writing could be used either logographically or phonetically. For example, the Akkadian sign AN (𒀭) could be an ideograph for "deity", an ideogram for the god Anum in particular, a logograph for the Akkadian stem il- "deity", a logograph for the Akkadian word šamu "sky", or a syllabogram for either the syllable an or il.[1]
