Phonogram (linguistics)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The history of the various primitive graphic systems, such as the Chinese, the Cuneiform, or the Egyptian, shows that the art of writing has invariably begun with hieroglyphic ideograms, slowly developed into phonograms, and passing gradually through syllabism towards alphabetism, the successive stages of the process occupying in every instance vast periods of time."--The History of the Alphabet (1899) by Isaac Taylor |
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A phonogram is a grapheme (written character) which represents a phoneme (speech sound) or combination of phonemes, such as the letters of the Latin alphabet or Korean letter Hangul. For example, "igh" is an English-language phonogram that represents the hard "I" sound in "high". Whereas the word phonemes refers to the sounds, the word phonogram refers to the letter(s) that represent that sound.
Phonograms contrast with logograms, which represent words and morphemes (meaningful units of language), and determinatives, silent characters used to mark semantic categories.
See also
- Emoji
- Logo
- Symbol
- Syllabogram
- Wingdings
- Rebus, the use of pictures to represent words or parts of words
