On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 12:24:49 UTC, Shachar Shemesh
wrote:
If memory serves me right, hieroglyphs actually represent
consonants (vowels are implicit), and as such, are most
definitely "characters".
Egyptian hieroglyphics uses logographs (symbols representing
whole words, which might be multiple syllables), letters, and
determinants (which don't represent any word but disambiguate the
surrounding words).
Looking things up serves me better than memory, usually.
The only language I can think of, off the top of my head, where
words have distinct signs is sign language.
Logographic writing systems. There is one logographic writing
system still in common use, and it's the standard writing system
for Chinese and Japanese. That's about 1.4 billion people. It was
used in Korea until hangul became popularized.
Unicode also aims to support writing systems that aren't used
anymore. That means Mayan, cuneiform (several variants), Egyptian
hieroglyphics and demotic script, several extinct variants on the
Chinese writing system, and Luwian.
Sign languages generally don't have writing systems. They're also
not generally related to any ambient spoken languages (for
instance, American Sign Language is derived from French Sign
Language), so if you speak sign language and can write, you're
bilingual. Anyway, without writing systems, sign languages are
irrelevant to Unicode.
