The thing to the left is a Chinese sign, but I am not really sure what to call it any more. When I was learning Chinese, back in the mists of time, aka the 1960s, I called it a character. When Michael Ashby and I were writing Introducing Phonetic Science we decided (finally) to call such things logograms. In other places you might find them called ideograms or even pictograms. Let’s have some definitions here and then see if Chinese signs fall neatly into any of these categories.
A logogram is a single sign which represents a word or morpheme without attempting to represent its pronunciation or its meaning. Here are some examples of logograms used in many languages: = & 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 %. It’s clear for example that the sign = gives you no idea how to pronounce the word, indeed the word is pronounced differently in different languages. Neither does the sign attempt to depict the notion {equals}. It is purely convention that we interpret it that way.
A pictogram is a sign that depicts the object concerned, often in a much simplified and/or stylised way. An illustration from Chinese is 木 (mù) meaning “tree”, which with a little imagination does look something like a tree. A good example of a Chinese ideogram is 本 (běn)which means “root”, which doesn’t actually look like a root , but captures the idea quite nicely.
It’s quite clear from the above that the signs used to write Chinese are a mixed bunch. In fact, I would hazard a guess that pure logograms are not all that common. Many words/morphemes are represented by signs which use the “rebus principle”. This is a process where the meaning of a sign is extended to represent a word which sounds like the original. An example is 羊 (yáng), originally a pictogram of a sheep (seen from above). This sounded like the word for “ocean” (and still does, amazingly) and so was used for that word too. However, things could get confusing if too many words were dealt with in this way, so someone had the bright idea of adding to such signs. The sign for “ocean” these days is 洋, the three dots at the side being a very abbreviated version of the sign for “water”. So what we have is not really a logogram because there is an indication of both the sound of the word and of the meaning too. A complicating factor is that the sound of Chinese words has changed radically since signs were invented using the rebus principle and often the so-called phonetic part of a sign is no longer a good indication its modern pronunciation.
So is Chinese written with a logographic system of signs? Not really. I think I’ll stick to the good old Chinese character.
I was very pleased to receive the news that Patricia Ashby has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship, one of only 50 in the country. Patricia arrived in UCL to study for the MA in Phonetics the year after I did. You can read more on this story on the 
