pictographic script

[aware of emptiness]

The first writing systems (hieroglyphics, sumerian cuneiform, maya etc.) were a language where one written word is represented by a symbol.

Later on, in nearly all the world's languages as they progressed switched to an alphabetic/syllabic script where a unit symbol represents a sound. The chinese script is, I think, is the only logographic/pictographic script that is used today.

What if the majority of the world did not switch to using an alphabet and still kept using the logographic/pictographic system. What would be the implications to our society and civilization?

 

[Max Sinister]

Hard to tell because nobody could really explain what kind of difference it makes. IMO a pictographic script has advantages and disadvantages:

Pro: It makes excellent brain training, if people have to learn 3000 signs first to be able to read; it takes less place to write.

Contra: Learning all those signs takes a lot of space in your brain you could otherwise use to learn other facts.

 

[Tyr]

Depends exactly how pictographic you want it to be.
Are we talking pure hardcore ye olde Chinese or kanji & modernised Chinese?
If the former...Scribes will very much be the order of theday.

 

[Leo Caesius]

On the downside, there would likely be less literacy. Literary knowledge would become the exclusive province of a highly-trained scribal class. The democratization of literacy requires an alphabet, capable of being taught in an afternoon and used by people with minimal education. This would also have important ramifications for the economy and international relations, as these things would be mediated by the scribal class.

On the plus side, a cross-linguistic literary language might well develop, as it did in the cuneiform world and in East Asia. Texts written in one pictographic script would be partially or even wholly comprehensible in other languages, so long as the phonetic complement of the script is kept to a minimum and the languages in question are of the analytical (Chinese, English, Persian) rather than synthetic (German, Russian, Arabic) type. In a region unified by such a script, people might speak completely incomprehensible languages but understand each others' literary documents. Leibniz aimed at developing such a language for the West but his efforts never bore fruit.

 

[aware of emptiness]

Actually, I think logograph is more of the term to use. Logogram is a given symbol which represents a word or a morpheme.

Pictogram is more so using images to convey ideas (and is more ambigious or idealistic and less writing-like).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logograph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictograph

So, I'm thinking if we used a script that is logographic, will that have an effect on the way our society works?

For one, typing would be a heck of a lot longer to take.

 

[Max Sinister]

Yes Leo, completely forgot how useful a pictographic script is for uniting people.

That bit about Leibnitz is interesting... he seemed to be deeper into Chinese culture than I knew... I already heard (by you?) that his works about the dual system were inspired by the I Ching...

Sorry if it's OT, but what about the syllable-based scripts? Are they just the link between the other alternatives ("not yet a real alphabet"), thus without the Pros of pictography, but not as practical as an alphabet yet?

 

[aware of emptiness]

On the downside, there would likely be less literacy. Literary knowledge would become the exclusive province of a highly-trained scribal class. The democratization of literacy requires an alphabet, capable of being taught in an afternoon and used by people with minimal education. This would also have important ramifications for the economy and international relations, as these things would be mediated by the scribal class.

Does a logographic script have that much of a dramatic effect on illiteracy rates? Modern China seems reasonably literate (ninety-something percent literacy, I think) I don't know much about ancient China though. Did ancient China have these problems?

 

[aware of emptiness]

Yes Leo, completely forgot how useful a pictographic script is for uniting people.

That bit about Leibnitz is interesting... he seemed to be deeper into Chinese culture than I knew... I already heard (by you?) that his works about the dual system were inspired by the I Ching...

Sorry if it's OT, but what about the syllable-based scripts? Are they just the link between the other alternatives ("not yet a real alphabet"), thus without the Pros of pictography, but not as practical as an alphabet yet?

Pure syllable scripts are rare. Indian languages are alphabetic/syllabic while Chinese are logograph/syllabic. The Japanese uses a consonant+vowel for a symbol, such as a symbol for ka, ko, ke etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary

 

[Max Sinister]

As Hendryk would say, under the Song China had a literacy rate of 30% (Europe then: Under 5%). Don't know how literate China was under the later dynasties.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Does a logographic script have that much of a dramatic effect on illiteracy rates? Modern China seems reasonably literate (ninety-something percent literacy, I think) I don't know much about ancient China though. Did ancient China have these problems?

Without universal and compulsory education (which is a product of the modern era), literacy in a logographic script will be the exclusive province of a cadre of highly-trained scholars, who will necessarily wield much more power as a result. The Chinese script takes years to learn, even after the Communists reformed the system. In the Middle East, by contrast, graffiti appears at the same time as the invention of the alphabet. There were scribes, to be sure (most of whom were trained in cuneiform, at least initially), but a large percentage of the population was semi-literate in the new alphabetic (or, more properly, abjad) scripts.

Syllabic scripts work even better than logographic ones, and have a much smaller number of characters, even if they are ultimately larger than alphabetic scripts. I don't think there's much of a difference between the two, in terms of literacy, although the alphabetic script is slightly more handy.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

I must say that, by the Edo period, the japanese litteracy % was surprisingly high for a complicated (for us) writting system (three systems, in fact...)... Maybe even better than occident at the time. Of course, this was a period of general peace and at the beginning, prosperity.

 

[Smaug]

Printing presses would have alot more pieces

 

[Tyr]

I must say that, by the Edo period, the japanese litteracy % was surprisingly high for a complicated (for us) writting system (three systems, in fact...)... Maybe even better than occident at the time. Of course, this was a period of general peace and at the beginning, prosperity.

Japanese isn't that bad though when compared to Chinese or ancient systems. Two of their systems weren't that much more complicated then our standard alphabet of 52 (...ok maybe 50, or 48 as some lower/upper are the same).
kanji officially has something like 50,000 characters however only 2000 are so are commonly used.
And Japan at the time very much had a culture of poetry and all.

Modern China: There is a modern simplified form of Chinese which only has something like 2500 characters (could be way off there) compared to regular Chinese with near to 100,000.....

It is perfectly possible to learn them, it just requires your brain to be wired in a certain way. I.e. you can get some people who can recognise and name types of tree leaves and whatnot.

 

[fortyseven]

In Greg Bear's Eon there's a holographic pictogram script.

I'd suggest that abjads would always develop although not universally adopted in any timeline without extraordinary circumstances.

 

[HelloLegend]

The first writing systems (hieroglyphics, sumerian cuneiform, maya etc.) were a language where one written word is represented by a symbol.

Later on, in nearly all the world's languages as they progressed switched to an alphabetic/syllabic script where a unit symbol represents a sound. The chinese script is, I think, is the only logographic/pictographic script that is used today.

What if the majority of the world did not switch to using an alphabet and still kept using the logographic/pictographic system. What would be the implications to our society and civilization?

The Han Chinese are not really a single ethnic group. It is made up of 12 or so ethnic groups that intermarried in the course of 1000 years. The one unifying them between them... they all wrote the same script.

If Europe had such a unified script, then cultural differences would matter less, because in an alphabet script... you can Gdanz, where as in a picture script, its YAMA, SHAN, OR MOUNTAIN, the picture is a mountain, pronounce it however you want...

Funny thing about the Japanese... why did they bother to create Hiragana when Kanji was good enough.

 

[mishery]

Funny thing about the Japanese... why did they bother to create Hiragana when Kanji was good enough.

To deal with the morphological structure that exists in Japanese but not Chinese I believe.

Logographic scripts are not good for languages with large amounts of inflectional or derivational morphology.

They would be particularly difficult to use for multiple languages that vary in their morphological structure. You could come up with bound-morpheme characters to encode e.g. inflectional endings, derivational morphemes but how would you cope with a word in one language being polymorphemic and simple in another? E.g. "arrive" is simple in English but in many languages e.g. German, Russian, it includes a prefix. Or that in English, other than the third person (he walks), present tense verbs have no endings (I walk, you walk etc.), whereas in many other language these person/number variants have endings.

 

[serebryakov]

Sorry if it's OT, but what about the syllable-based scripts? Are they just the link between the other alternatives ("not yet a real alphabet"), thus without the Pros of pictography, but not as practical as an alphabet yet?

They can be bundled with alphabets in that they tend to have limited number of signs: they are not inherently "more" or "less" practical, just more or less suited for a particular language (I've just re-read "Against the Tide of Years" -- "Christ on a crutch, seventy alternate meanings?!" ). But logographic scripts tend to simplify into syllabic ones...