ABSTRACT
Sinographs (Chinese characters) were the dominant form of writing in East Asia in the first millennium CE. Although sinographs are commonly called ‘ideographs,’ they do not represent ideas without any reference to language. On the contrary, sinographs were originally intended to represent specific morphemes of a specific language — Chinese. Morphemes are minimal units of meaning associated with phonetic forms. Hence each sinograph represents both the meaning and the pronunciation of a Chinese morpheme (Figure 2.1).
