A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (the smallest meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes (speech sounds) or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.

Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logographic systems described here are truly ideographic.

Since logograms are visual symbols representing words rather than the sounds or phonemes that make up the word, it is relatively easier to remember or guess the meaning of logograms, while it might be relatively harder to remember or guess the sound of alphabetic written words. Another feature of logograms is that a single logogram may be used by a plurality of languages to represent words with similar meanings. While disparate languages may also use the same or similar alphabets, abjads, abugidas, syllabaries and the like, the degree to which they may share identical representations for words with disparate pronunciations is much more limited.

Logographic systems[link]

Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have their origins as logograms.

Logographic systems, or logographies, include the earliest true writing systems; the first historical civilizations of the Near East, Africa, China, and Central America used some form of logographic writing.

A purely logographic script would be impractical for most languages, and none is known apart from one devised for the artificial language Toki Pona, a purposely limited language with only 120 morphemes. A more recent attempt is Zlango, intended for use in text messaging, currently including around 300 "icons". All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In both Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of fusing such phonetic elements with determinatives; such "radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script, and both languages relegated simple rebuses to the spelling of foreign loan words and words from non-standard dialects.

Logographic writing systems include:

• Logoconsonantal scripts

  These are scripts in which the graphemes may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ "duck" and sȝ "son", though it is likely that these words were not pronounced the same apart from their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are,

  *Hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic: Ancient Egypt

• Logosyllabic scripts

  These are scripts in which the graphemes represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include,

  *Anatolian hieroglyphs: Luwian

  *Cuneiform: Sumerian, Akkadian, other Semitic languages, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, and Urartian

  *Dongba script written with Geba script: Naxi language (Dongba itself is pictographic)

  *Tangut script: Tangut language

  *Shui script: Shui language^{[dubious – discuss][the article claims it's pictographic]}

  *Maya glyphs: Chorti, Yucatec, and other Classic Maya languages

  *Yi (classical): various Yi languages

  *Han characters: Chinese languages, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese

  *Derivatives of Han characters:

  **Chữ nôm: Vietnam

  **Geba script: Naxi

  **Jurchen script: Jurchen

  **Khitan large script: Khitan

  **Sawndip: Zhuang languages

None of these systems is purely logographic. This can be illustrated with Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes: some morphemes are composed of more than one character. For example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was created by fusing the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū (literally "know cinnabar") with the 'bug' determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately (except to stand in for 蜘蛛 in poetry). In Archaic Chinese, one can find the reverse: a single character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Archaic Chinese 王 hjwangs, a combination of a morpheme hjwang meaning king (coincidentally also written 王) and a suffix pronounced s. (The suffix is preserved in the modern falling tone.) In modern Mandarin, bimorphemic syllables are always written with two characters, for example 花儿 huār "flower (diminutive)".

A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the Aramaic abjad) used to write Middle Persian during much of the Sassanid period; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination "M-L-K" would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn, were dispensed with altogether after the Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet.

Logograms are used in modern shorthand to represent common words. In addition, the numerals and mathematical symbols used in alphabetic systems are logograms—1 one, 2 two, + plus, = equals, and so on. In English, the ampersand & is used for and and et (such as &c for et cetera), % for percent, $ for dollar, # for number, € for euro, £ for pound, etc.

Semantic and phonetic dimensions[link]

All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language.^[1] In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideographic component, called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese.^[2]

Typical Egyptian usage is to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinative to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are a fixed combination of a radical that indicates its semantic category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components.

Chinese characters[link]

Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters hanzi into six types by etymology.

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. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up the same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves.

Excerpt from a 1436 primer on Chinese characters

1. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms, which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented, e.g. 山 for "mountain".
2. The second type are ideograms that attempt to visualize abstract concepts, such as 上 "up" and 下 "down". Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, 刀 is a pictogram meaning "knife", while 刃 is an ideogram meaning "blade".
3. Radical-radical compounds in which each element of the character (called radical) hints at the meaning. For example, 休 "rest" is composed of the characters for "man" (人) and "tree" (木), with the intended idea of someone leaning against a tree, i.e. resting.
4. Radical-phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (Chinese: liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ("wood") its meaning of "supporting beam". Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.^[3]
5. Changed-annotation characters are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographic and often semantic drift. For instance, 樂 can mean both "music"(pinyin: yuè ) and "pleasure" (pinyin: lè).
6. Improvisational characters (lit. "improvised-borrowed-words") come into use when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and hence another character with the same or a similar sound (and often a close meaning) is "borrowed"; occasionally, the new meaning can supplant the old meaning. 自 used to be a pictographic word meaning "nose", but was borrowed to mean "self". It is now used almost exclusively to mean "self", while the "nose" meaning survives only in set-phrases and more archaic compounds. Because of their derivational process, the entire set of Japanese kana can be considered to be of this character, hence the name kana (仮名; 仮 is a simplified form of 假 but used in Korea and Japan).

The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese, post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese, which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruents, and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants); the Old Chinese difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization or pharyngealization); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than the tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound.

Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 每 "each", pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin, are the characters 侮 "to humiliate", 悔 "to regret" and 海 "sea", pronounced wǔ, huǐ and hǎi respectively in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/(每) /m̥ˤəʔ/(悔) /m̥ˤəʔ/(海) according to a recent reconstruction by William Baxter^[4] – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations.

Chinese characters used in Japanese and Korean[link]

Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi) by large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however, the adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja, respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture.

Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on the basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as morphographic writing systems.^{[citation needed]}

Advantages and disadvantages[link]

Separating writing and pronunciation[link]

The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes aren't linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that one doesn't need to understand the pronunciation or language of the writer to understand it. The reader will recognise the meaning of 1, whether it is called one, ichi or wāḥid in the language of the writer. Likewise, people speaking different Chinese dialects may not understand each other in speaking, but can to a significant extent in writing even if they don't write in standard Chinese. Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan prior to modern times, communication by writing (筆談) was the norm of international trade and diplomacy.

This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from the pronunciation. Though not an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Finnish make the practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Both English and French orthography are more complicated than that and character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul, the Korean language writing system, is an example of an alphabet that was designed to replace the logogrammic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used in Korea.

According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in PRC's "Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese" (现代汉语常用字表) cover 99.48% of a two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the "Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters" (常用國字標準字體表) by the Ministry of Education of ROC, while 4,759 in the "Soengjung Zi Zijing Biu" (常用字字形表) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong, both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combination of two or more already-learned characters.

Characters in information technology[link]

Inputting complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to a practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie or Wubi method of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered.

Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while the Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word^[5] and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only the bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that follows merging large character sets with smaller ones.

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2008)

• DeFrancis, John (1984). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6. 
• Hannas, William C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X. 
• Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. NYU Press. ISBN 0-8147-3690-4. , Chapter 3.
• Williams and Bright, The World's Writing Systems, Oxford, 1996.

External links[link]

• 古代文字資料館　Ancient Writing Library
• Chinese Script and Language

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.^[3] One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.^[4] His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.

Life and career[link]

Early life[link]

Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940),^[5] an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.^[6]

Lang's parents were of Moravian^{[citation needed]} descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".^[7]

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded three times. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.

Expressionist films: the Weimar years (1918-1933)[link]

His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's five-hour Die Nibelungen, the famous 1927 film Metropolis, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924

Although some^[who?] consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.^{[citation needed]} His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin.

In 1931, after Woman in the Moon, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. His wearing a monocle added to the stereotype.

At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character.

Whereas Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage,^[7] his wife and screen writer Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1932. They soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under Nazi eugenics laws he would be identified as a Jew even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

Emigration[link]

On the set of The Woman in the Moon, 1929.

Shortly afterwards, Lang left Germany. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him that The Testament of Dr Mabuse was being banned but that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially Metropolis), he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had stated that it was during this meeting that he had decided to leave for Paris - but that the banks had closed by the time the meeting was over. Lang has stated that he fled that very evening. ^[8][9]

Lang left Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris^[10] after his marriage to Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, ended in 1933.^{[citation needed]}

In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States.^[10]

Hollywood career (1936-1957)[link]

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury, starring Spencer Tracy as a man wrongly lynched for a crime he didn't commit. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavorably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.

One of his most famous films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer Artur Brauner expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May),^[11] so Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his "Indian Epic". Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

Death and legacy[link]

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.^[12]

Filmography[link]

Pop culture[link]

• Lang appears as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Le Mepris. During the film, his reputation is discussed, and he somewhat lampoons his own reputation for being a temperamental director.

• An old German director with the demeanor of Lang appears during the filming of a bank robbery in Woody Allen's 1969 comedy Take the Money and Run.

• In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, Lang is mentioned in tandem with James Cameron on page 48.

• A fictional Lang appears as a main character in the Fullmetal Alchemist movie Conqueror of Shambala.

• In Episode 11 of Season 1 of City Hunter, the antagonist's name is Fritz Lang.

• Madonna portrayed Lang for a sequence in her 1989 music video for "Express Yourself", complete with Lang's signature suit and monocle. The video itself is a tribute to Metropolis (film).

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Michaux, Agnès. 'Je les chasserai jusqu'au bout du monde jusqu'à ce qu'ils en crèvent; Paris: Editions 1, 1997; ISBN 2-86391-933-4
• Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0 (See e.g. pp. 45–46 for anecdotes revealing Lang's arrogance.)
• McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; New York: St. Martins Press, 1997; ISBN 0-312-13247-6
• Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood; Wien: Europaverlag, c1986; ISBN 3-203-50953-9 (in German)
• Youngkin, Stephen (2005). The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2360-7.  - Contains interviews with Lang and a discussion of the making of the film M

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Fritz Lang at the Internet Movie Database
• Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• Senses of Cinema - Biographie
• Fritz Lang at filmportal.de
• Interview with Fritz Lang from 1967
• Bibliography
• Fritz Lang at Find a Grave
• (French) "Symptôme, exhibition, angoisse. Représentation de la terreur dans l’œuvre allemande de Fritz Lang (1919-1933/1959-1960)", un article de Nicole Brenez extrait de De la Figure en général et du Corps en particulier (1998).