Skip to main content
Linguistics

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

7
  • Define "entirely non-logographic"? Basically all writing systems use logograms to some extent. Commented Feb 12 at 2:01
  • Fair- that's my own lack of understanding at play, I think! My understanding is that in a logographic system, the symbols convey a semantic value but not a phonetic value - the sound of the symbol must be known independently. In a phonetic system, the symbols convey only their sound, and the meaning must be known independently. Does that clarification track? Commented Feb 12 at 2:30
  • 3
    Coptic script is descended from other scripts (Greek and so on) that weren't used to write Egyptian languages, and it's those scripts which were derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. What I'm saying is, the word "evolve" being used here makes the scope of the question unclear to me - the Coptic/Egyptian example tells you that scripts mostly change due to them needing adaptation into a language they weren't developed for, and I would guess that the changes from Hieroglyphs to Coptic would be sudden jumps rather than smooth transitions. Commented Feb 12 at 3:03
  • 3
    Hieroglyphs were primarily phonetic, with most hieroglyphs in a text representing the consonants in the word (some hieroglyphs representing single consonants, some multiple), with a minority being used as semantic determiners, and a much smaller proportion being used genuinely logographically (although many phonetic hieroglyphs have their origin in the consonants found in the word they represent) Commented Feb 12 at 10:25
  • 1
    For what it's worth, I think smartphones fairly clearly have increased the use of logograms in written English, from "none to speak of" to 🚀. Granted most uses of emojis are figurative, not literally the object depicted. Commented Feb 12 at 20:42