What is an ideographic writing?

The origin of writing took place several thousand years ago. Its history begins with the first rock paintings. And the more successfully it developed, the higher in a particular nationality was the level of culture of the spiritual and material. Modern writing no longer resembles the original signs and symbols.

Historical background

Ideographic writing is a kind of writing, the symbols of which indicate not so much an object as an abstract event.

An important difference from its pictography is that the sign is read not in form but in meaning, and means already a separate word or its significant part. That is why the ideographic letter conveys the said more precisely.

At the initial stage of the development of ideographic writing, pictograms depicted visual objects, and everything that had an abstract meaning was indicated by ideograms. That is, the same sign in one text could carry both a direct value and a portable one. The first ideographic symbols in practice remained simple drawings, a little later they began to coincide with each other. For example, the image of the eye, as a symbol of a pictographic letter, bears the information that this is an "eye", while in ideographic writing the same "eye" plus the symbol of "water" means "tear" or "cry."

For a long time, the signs of ideographic writing have become more stable and generally understood.

An exceptional feature

The special quality that the ideographic writing possessed was the ability to consolidate abstract images and concepts that were expressed in words. Signs of this record differed in that they were tied to a specific word. Each symbol of an ideographic record showed no grammatical or phonetic meaning, but conveyed the content and meaning of a specific word. This feature destroyed the language barrier between people with different dialects.

Pros and cons of an ideographic letter can be listed for a long time. The most important is that this type of writing has a practically literal orderly fixation of the word's composition. Another uniqueness of the ideographic letter is the stabilization of the forms of graphic symbols and their number. This led to the fact that the writer chose the necessary symbols from the finished set, and did not invent them. However, there are several negative nuances. The brightest of them are:

• It is difficult enough to transmit grammatical forms;
• Many signs;
• Words that have an abstract meaning can not be transmitted.

Rapid evolution

Formation of ideographic writing was during the period of a breakthrough in the development of trade, the emergence of the notion of statehood and the emergence of production of the creation of public material goods. At this time, there is a need for the transmission of large volumes of information. And consequently, it was necessary not only to correctly recognize symbols, but also to reproduce them faster. This led to significant changes. The ideographic letter was transformed from a simple schematic hieroglyph into a symbol meaning the part of the word or even the word that everyone understands. His signs for a long time remained in motion, because they could transmit not only visual meaning, but also abstract.

Rudiments of sound marks

Studying the types of ideographic writing, you can see the first elements of the signs denoting sounds. This is the rudiment of phonography. Such changes have occurred due to the increasing movement of people and the development of trade relations. For the same reason, several attempts have been made to simplify the ways of writing hieroglyphics.

One of them consisted in combining two signs, for example, a tear - "water" and a number of "eyes". Another suggested to the roots-characters to add hieroglyphs-affixes. Both were unproductive.

Development received a system of writing, which transmits the spoken phrase not only in a grammatical way, but also phonetic. Complex or big words began to be divided into parts, so there was a syllable, on which there was one hieroglyph.

Varieties

Quite a wide application received an ideographic letter. Examples There is in the modern world. And in the era of ideography, a vivid example was the writing of Ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians were among the first to use symbols having a portable, abstract meaning. But the words became more and more, and the number of ideograms did not increase. It is time to expand the letter. Noticing that speech - these are the same elements, of which words are composed, the Egyptians became hieroglyphs to designate individual syllables, and then sounds. So they came to the alphabet, even if they were one-sided (because of the peculiarities of the language, the vowels are not particularly important). There were also qualifiers for writing. They explained homonyms, that is, words with different meanings, but they were pronounced equally.

Another common type is the cuneiform ideographic writing. It was in the course of Assyro-Babylonians and Sumerians (the peoples of Ancient Mesopotamia). "Wrote" here finely sharpened reed cutter on clay tiles. Vertical columns went one after the other from right to left, less often vice versa. Later, in connection with the need to transmit a large amount of information, the tablet had to be turned 90 ° to the left. Thus, the upper edge was the former right, and the left - the former upper. The column was turned into a horizontal line, and the writing began from left to right. Together with this, there was a simplification of the drawing, which gradually turned into a symbol.

There are examples in the modern world. A modern example of ideographic writing is China. In the written language of this people - about 60 000 characters. But in everyday life for reading and writing the average Chinese uses no more than two or three thousand.

There is an ideographic writing today too

A vivid example of an ideogram is arithmetic signs. Each symbol denotes an abstract concept: division, addition, multiplication, equality and so on. The same can be said about the numbers. Arithmetic expression 4: 2 = 2 Chinese, American or Russian will understand equally, although they will say it differently.

Or, for example, the word "man". The Shanghaiian will pronounce his "ning", the Roman - "yan", and the Beijing - "zhen". But it is written in all three cases will be one symbol. Because the ideographic letter conveys the concept, not sound.