Another example is 木 ‘tree’ and 木木 ‘grove.’
For example, the character for ‘one’ is 一. Ideographs are characters derived from symbols representing ideas or abstractions. For example, the character 溤evolved from a pictograph of a horse. They were originally inscribed on stone tablets, bones, and tortoise shells. They are stylized depictions of objects in the real world and are among the oldest characters in Chinese. Roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictographs. Chinese characters are an example of a complex script. Such scripts usually contain a large number of symbols. Traditional Chinese character for ‘horse’Ĭomplex scripts consist of symbols that often represent both sound and meaning. In this way, the Chinese writing system is a unifying factor for all speakers of this largest language community in the world. This symbol can be understood by speakers of all Chinese dialects regardless of how they may pronounce it. For instance, the word for person is pronounced as ren, yen, nyin, or len in different regions of China, but it is written everywhere as. The Chinese writing system is well-suited for the language because the same words are pronounced quite differently in different parts of China. Today roughly 600 Chinese characters are pictograms, while the majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds.
#Symbols for numbers in different languages series
But even so, it was a real writing system and not just a series of pictures. Some of them resembled the objects they attempted to represent. The earliest known logographs, or pictograms, were inscribed on oracle bones. It is thought to have originated as pictures around 2,000 BC. بĪrabic symbol representing the consonant Ĭhinese writing is the oldest system in the world that has hardly changed in the last 4,000 years. The Arabic script is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is estimated that the Arabic script is used by close to 1 billion people worldwide. Turkish, Swahili, Hausa, and Uzbek are among languages that used the Arabic script before they adopted either Latin or Cyrillic script. Several other unrelated languages use the Arabic script including Persian, Pashto, and Urdu which use an adapted version of the Arabic script, called Perso-Arabic. Its present form ( Naskh) first appeared in the 11th century AD, and has been used ever since, especially for print. Since then, the script has undergone several modifications.
The earliest Arabic inscription dates to 512 AD. The Arabs added dots above and below the consonants to represent vowels. The Nabataean alphabet contained only symbols for consonants. Nabateans added 6 symbols to the Aramaic alphabet to represent sounds that did not occur in Aramaic. The Arabic script is based on the Nabataean alphabet which was used to write the Nabataean dialect of Aramaic. Curiously, only about one-third of the world’s 6,912 languages have writing systems. Some think that religion was the motivating force, while others suggest that it was motivated by the need to keep business records. There are differing opinions as to why people felt the need to write. Without writing, human history and man’s knowledge of the world would not have been possible. Whereas speech is ephemeral, writing leaves a permanent record of a language.The invention of writing some 5,000 years ago is probably one of the greatest achievements of humankind. The study of writing systems, to a large extent, consists of establishing correspondences between these marks, or symbols, and units of the spoken language such as individual sounds, syllables, morphemes (smallest units of meaning), or words. A writing system, also referred to as script or orthography, is a convention for representing the units of a spoken language by making marks on rocks, leaves, clay, bark, metal, or paper.