In some cases of ideographic scripts, only the author of a text can read it with any certainty, and it may be said that they are interpreted rather than read. Hieroglyphs were commonly thought to be ideographic before they were translated, and to this day, Chinese is often erroneously said to be ideographic. Unger disputes claims made on behalf of Blissymbols in his 2004 book Ideogram.Īlthough a few pictographic or ideographic scripts exist today, there is no single way to read them because there is no one-to-one correspondence between symbol and language. Essentially, they postulate that no full writing system can be completely pictographic or ideographic it must be able to refer directly to a language in order to have the full expressive capacity of a language. Ideographic scripts (in which graphemes are ideograms representing concepts or ideas rather than a specific word in a language) and pictographic scripts (in which the graphemes are iconic pictures) are not thought to be able to express all that can be communicated by language, as argued by the linguists John DeFrancis and J. Pictographic/ideographic writing systems Other informative or qualifying annotations for the script may also be provided.

The usual name of the script is given first the name of the language(s) in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name. This is a list of writing systems (or scripts), classified according to some common distinguishing features. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols. This article contains special characters.

Bengali ancient alphabet