Pictograms, Ideograms and Logograms

A Pictograph or a pictogram is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration.

Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transported through drawing, which is the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. "Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC."Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures. ( http://www.citrinitas.com).

An ideogram or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged. Wayfinding signages, that can be found in airports or other environments, where there are people from different places of the world, there fore don't speak the same language. These signage are used worldwide, so everyone can understand. The term "ideogram" is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems. To illustrate it, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are like that. Although, symbols in logographic systems usually represent words or morphemes, not pure ideas.

"A logogram or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds." (http://www.citrinitas.com)

Far Eastern Ideogramatic Writing Systems

A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese and Korean . It is possible that precedents appeared as early as 8000 years ago, and a complete writing system in Chinese characters was developed 3500 years ago in China, which is the oldest surviving writing system. Chinese characters are extracted directly from individual pictograms or combinations of pictograms and phonetic signs.

The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035.