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Many ideograms only represent ideas by convention. For example, a red octagon only carries the meaning of 'stop' due to the public association and reification of that meaning over time. In the field of semiotics, these are a type of pure sign, a term which also includes symbols using non-graphical media.
Chinese characters are logographs, which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in a language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes. Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length.
Simple ideograms (指事; zhǐshì; 'indication'), express an abstract idea with an iconic form. Compound ideographs ( 會意 ; 会意 ; huìyì ; 'joined meaning'), combine two or more semantic components to indicate the meaning of the character.
The first two types are "single-body", meaning that the character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters.
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name.
Ideograms (指事字; zhǐshìzì) are abstract symbols such as 三; sān; 'three' and 上; shàng; 'up'. Semantic compounds (會意字; huìyìzì) combine simpler elements to indicate the meaning of the word, as in 林; lín; 'grove', composed of two 木. Characters directly descendant of these forms remain still among the most commonly used ...
The ideograms are symbols, not pictures of the objects in question; for example, one tablet records a tripod with missing legs, but the ideogram used is of a tripod with three legs. In modern transcriptions of Linear B tablets, it is typically convenient to represent an ideogram by its Latin or English name or by an abbreviation of the Latin name.
Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms, symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: [37] Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include a component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. [38]