Logograms
What are Logograms?
Logograms are symbols used written language that stand for an entire word or morpheme, a meaningful unit of speech. While lots modern writing systems use logograms to some degree, there are no purely logo ungrammatical writing systems in use today. Logograms are characterized by being unrelated to the speech of the word they represent; they cannot be sounded out, as words written with an alphabet may be. This is the case in writing systems like Cuneiform and Chinese. Logo grammatical writing systems also more and more make use of phonetic elements as they evolve to handle new language situations.
For example, many logo ungrammatical systems of the individual world, such as Mayan and Aztec glyphs, used phonetic symbols to supplement ideograms when logograms themselves were not sufficient for expression. In fact, a writing system must have a phonetic component in order to be complete; full expression is simply not possible otherwise. Even the Roman letters used for English and most other European languages are derived from ancient pictograms representing example words that started with each letter.
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