What are ideographic languages?

IDEOGRAPHIC WRITING, the representation of language by means of “ideograms,” i.e. symbols representing “ideas,” rather than (or usually side by side with) symbols which represent sounds.

What is the difference between ideograms and Logograms?

An ideogram or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in alphabetic languages. A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language).

What is the basic difference between pictograms and ideograms?

The distinctive difference between a pictogram and an ideogram lies in the words themselves. A pictogram uses a picture of an object and an ideogram uses a symbol made of geometric shapes to represent an idea. Pictogram, picture.

Why is English alphabet not phonetic?

Like we all know, the English alphabet has 26 letters. This, consequently, makes English a non-phonetic language, which means that the pronunciation of a word is not dependent on its spelling.

Is cuneiform ideographic?

The term “ideogram” is often used to describe symbols of writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese characters. However, these symbols represent elements of a particular language, mostly words or morphemes (so that they are logograms), rather than objects or concepts.

Why is the Latin alphabet still used in Europe?

Most if not all the area of Europe which uses the Latin alphabet was once part of the Roman Empire, and used Latin as the language of trade even if it wasn’t the native language (much like English today). Many European languages (the Romance family) are direct descendants of Latin, so not surprising they’d keep the alphabet as well.

How easy is it to crack a phonetic alphabet?

The Rosetta stone is an example of how easy it is to crack multiple phonetic alphabets. Each phonetic language has a symbol for the “k” sound (though some have “kh” differentiated). In addition to being interchangeable, this made it far easier to adapt a certain alphabet to different languages.

Why is there so much alphabetic confusion in eastern Asia?

So the basis for alphabetic confusion in Eastern Asia is basically that it started as a conceptually similar use of a non-phonetic alphabet, which is very vulnerable to regional divergence, and different lands used different means to eventually cope with this and change it to a regionally acceptable phonetic alphabet.

Why don’t most European languages use Chinese characters anymore?

In contrast most European languages are Indo-European, and yet many uses the Cryllic script, not Latin. Having said that, Thai, Mandarin, and Japanese (and Korean and Vietnamese etc etc) all used Chinese characters once upon a time. Things changed because those are very different languages.