Where they represent them to a greater or lesser degree. I've already cited the examples of Hebrew and English, neither or which are what one might call 'phonetic'. Given that all the Western languages are significantly related, I'd say it need not be much 'worse'. Firstly, as far as the meaning of the word is concerned, this hardly matters at all. But as for the sound: some sample cases of where an alphabetic scripts can be non-phonetic are 'interpolated' sounds (like Hebrew vowels), silent letters (let's nominate Irish, before David D. does it for us), letters with different sounds (different between languages with the same script; or by context; or seemingly in ad hoc fashion), and groups of letters which form a single phomeme (English is a grave offender in all of these). I've doubtless omitted one or two crimes against orthography perpetrated by merciless humanity over the millennia...
> What would they represent in that case? They would have to represent
something,
> atoms of a word, you can actually use to construct words with.
That's somewhat like saying, what do the individual strokes of a logogram 'represent', to take an admittedly extreme case. As far as meaning is concerned, only the whole word really matters.
> Sign languages for deaf persons (a ideographic language in a very short-lived
> medium) does indeed have alphabetical signs that (for the deaf) do not
> represent sounds, but written characters. But their meaning is derived from
our
> normal spoken languages, so in a way they represent sound anyhow.
i.e., it's not a pure 'ideographic' language at all, it's a 'mixed script' language. c.f. Japanese, Rebus-scripts, etc. Besides, in this case that's the language itself, not an add-on script.
But it's true that to convey 'foreign words', names, etc, it does require an alphabetic sub-language (sub-script?). For similar reasons, as I keep trying to point out, a pure logographic Western is basically impossible. Chinese really is exceptional in several respects, which is why it's just about the only language left which is. (And for quite some time, not just the last century or three.)
Cheers,
Alex.
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