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phonogram

CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: The same or different forms used to represent sounds; a character or symbol used to represent a word, syllable, or phoneme.

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cuneiform

CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: The characteristic wedge-shaped writing of western Asia, used for over 3000 years, emerging in the 4th millennium BC in southern Mesopotamia as a system of accounting during the Uruk period. It consisted of triangular markings pressed on a clay tablet with a split reed. The word itself comes from Latin 'cuneus' meaning wedge-shaped" "wedge". The pictographic script of the Uruk period the oldest known in the world was reduced to angular forms to make it more suitable for impressing in wet clay with a split reed. The nature of the script was very like that of the Egyptians with ideographs phonograms and determinatives. The script was used for a number of languages (Sumerian Akkadian Elamite Hittite Old Persian etc.) even being adapted to serve as an alphabet at Ugarit. The first success in its decipherment was by Georg Grotefend a German philologist in 1802. In inscriptions from Persepolis he recognized the names of Darius and Xerxes and the Old Persian word for 'king'. In 1844-1847 further progress came through the recording and study of Darius's rock inscriptions at Behistun by Henry Rawlinson. He was able to translate the Old Persian version; Westergaard in 1854 tackled the Elamite text and Rawlinson with others cracked the Babylonian in 1857. This was much the most important of the three as it led directly back through the many cuneiform inscriptions at that time coming to light to the first written records those of ancient Sumer. Cuneiform texts have been found in Egypt at el-'Amarna and on various objects of the Persian Period. In the Near East cuneiform tablets from Egypt have been found at Bogazkoy in Anatolia and Kamid el-Loz in Syria. A consonantal alphabet developed at Ugarit which vanished with the town at beginning of 12th c BC; and syllabary script was used solely by Achaemenid Persians to transcribe their language from 6th-4th c BC."

hieroglyphics

SYNONYM: hieroglyphic; hieroglyph
CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: A pictorial script used by ancient Egyptians from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC until the end of the 4th century AD. A hieroglyph was a single character or pictorial element used in hieroglyphics. Literally, in Greek, it means 'sacred carved letters'. The script consisted of three basic types of sign: phonograms, logograms, and 'determinatives' arranged in horizontal and vertical lines. The script was used for funerary and monumental inscriptions as well as more strictly religious ones. The script's development seems to have been so rapid that it may have been in some sense an imitation of the earliest writing of Mesopotamia in its Uruk phase. In both scripts three classes of symbol were used, each a single picture or geometric figure. Pictograms or ideograms represented whole words in pictorial form. Phonograms represented the sounds of words, the picture of an object pronounced in the same way as the desired word being used in its place (this was made easier by the fact that the vowels were disregarded). Determinatives told the reader the class of word spelt by the phonograms, necessary where these were ambiguous. Often all three classes of symbol were used in conjunction. No attempt was made in its long history to simplify the system, even when the more cursive forms of it, hieratic and demotic, were introduced. More loosely the term has been applied to other pictographic writing systems, particularly those of Minoan Crete, the Hittites and the Maya. Many of the symbols consist of a conventionalized picture of the idea or object they represent. Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, through his study of the bilingual inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone and an obelisk from Philae. Some 700 signs were employed.

logogram

SYNONYM: logograph
CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: A written or pictorial symbol intended to represent a whole word. Writing systems that make use of logograms include Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, and early cuneiform writing systems. No known writing system is totally logographic; all such systems have both logograms and symbols representing particular sounds or syllables. A logogram represents a frequently recurring word or phrase, differing from a determinative in that it furnishes additional information instead of classifying information already given. Many scripts contain a class of logograms, such as $, =, +, and numeric signs in English. Abbreviations, though composed of phonograms, are logographic in function.