Ideographic+Writing

Ideographic Writing Ideographic writing is a system of writing that doesn't use an alphabet. Instead, an ideographic writing system uses symbols (or graphics) to represent an idea or thing. Since every single idea in the language must be represented by a symbol, ideographic systems usually have hundreds or even thousands of symbols. Hieroglyphs are a type of ideographic writing system because they use lots and lots of symbols to represent things such as animals or kings. Before languages had immense vocabularies, ideographic writing was a good simple way of writing. Therefore, many ancient civilizations like the Maya or Ancient Egyptians employed hieroglyphs as their writing system. Generally speaking though, most modern languages are not solely based on ideagrams. Most modern scripts do use ideograms in their writing though. For example, 1,2,3 (all numbers), $, &, @, and % are ideograms that English speaking people use on a daily basis. Many people believe that Chinese is a completely ideographic writing system, but it is not. Chinese is a phonetic system. Go Back to Terms List for Unit 1

Created by Joe Hampton on August 29, 2008.

Edited by: Frances Grimball September 3, 2008

Sources: [|The Ideographic Myth]