Limitation of Hieroglyphs in semantic

           Hieroglyphs is the writing system which markup language meaning then to form the meaning of the word, it is the result of simplify picture notepad. Hieroglyphs play an important role before letters were invented. The most famous hieroglyphs of Chinese is “Jiaguwen”, which has a long history of more than three thousands of years. Jiaguwen is very plentiful, and hard to understand even though it was the beginning of Chinese writing system. Look at the following pictures, they are the most simple hieroglyphs

         From these two pictures, we can see that, hieroglyphs came from drawing, it was very difficult to write a letter. It was a very intuitive and detail language writing system, it can describe entities that can be seen by eyes. According to this, hieroglyphs has lots of limitations.

           First, hard to characterize entities or properties that do exist but cannot be seen, such as air, power, wind, seasons, hot, cold, warm, ect.

          Second, hieroglyphs cannot describe the abstract, non-figurative concepts, such as thoughts, mental activities, philosophy and so on, because abstract concepts are formed since human have to recapitulate the things they recognized, these new structured concepts have no forms to be visual, so that hieroglyphs cannot easily to draw them down.

         All the above just because semantic in our mental are the reference of the real world, it contains too many things, involving entities, events, relations between each other. The reference can be intuitive and detail, it also can be abstract, unvisual. So hieroglyphs are the most basic writing system, it can characterize a little part of language, but when we need to transfer something more than the detail entities, we have to invent another writing system to satisfy our requirement.