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      What is a logical operator? “Logical operator ” make only one kind of the “logical factors” or “logical means”, others being “definiteness”, “coreference”, “tense” and “time”, since predication is not the whole of a sentence or proposition. All these factors play a part in prepositional actualization of the predication ---the pining of a predication down a claim about reality. Example of logical operators are “not”, “and”, “or”, “some”, “if”, “false”, etc. The term “logical
operation” reflects the fact that these meaning elements are often thought of as performing operations, controlling elements of the semantic system, so to speak
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      Why is writing important? Why is speech considered prior to writing? Language can take the form of speech or writing, the former using sound as medium and the latter employing visual symbols. No one could tell when mankind first spoke; nor could people tell when mankind developed the first writing. A writing system consists of a graphemes plus characteristic features of their use, resulting in the diversion of the writing forms; word writing, syllabic writing and sound writing. It is widely considered that speech is the primary medium, and writing the secondary medium. But this comparative diminution does not mean that writing is unimportant. With the shot-lived memory and the finite capacity of information storing, writing is used, partly for compensation and partly for better communication. We cannot trust the negotiation counterpart so we turn to the writing and signing of an agreement. Writing leads people to the acme of science, study and research, and to the ultimate joy of literature  77
      What is a pictogram? What is an ideogram? A “pictogram” refers to an inscription representing the features of a physical object. The Hebrew and the Chinese orthography still reflects traces of their pictorial origin. For instance, the letter “a” (aleph) imitates the head of an ox and the letter “b” (beth) imitates a horse. And “niú”, “m
ǎ
”, “h
ǔ
”and hundreds more of Chinese words derived from, and still keep the pictorial resemblance to, the shapes of the things or objects. The advantage of pictograms is that they can be easily understood by anyone. That explains why international road signs and public-toilet signs make a wide use of them
An “ideogram” means an idea picture or idea writing. In order to express the attribute of an object or concepts associated with it, the pictogram’s meaning had to be extended. For instance, a picture of the sun does not necessarily represent the object itself, but connotes “warmth”, “heat”, “light”, “daytime”, etc. In spite of its disadvantages, the later form of ideograms turned out to be linguistic symbols, symbols for the sounds of these objects. The process is called the “Rebus Principle” indicating that writing is like a riddle composed of words or syllables depicted by symbols or pictures that suggest the sound of the words or syllables they represent. 78
      What is word writing? What is sound writing? What is syllabic writing? Word writing refers to the writing system based on ideograms and/or pictograms, like Chinese. “Sound writing ” or “alphabetic writing”, which dominates the world, derived form the Latin alphabet with mild adjustments. Most of the European alphabets belong to the sound writing system, e.g., Spanish, German, French, English, etc. “Syllabic writing” is a word-syllabus writing, developed by the Egyptians. Japanese is a typical syllabic-writing language, though derived from Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language. The Japanese modified the Chinese characters they had borrowed from ancient China so that the Japanese syllables (to the number of fifty) were each represented, either by what is called “hiragana” or by what is name “katakana”

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      What is a grapheme? What is orthography? A “grapheme” is the minimal constructive unit in the writing system of a language. The English grapheme A is represented by A,
α
,a etc. Orthography means correct spelling, spelling rules or attempts to improve spelling
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      What is affixation, conversion and compounding? “Affixation” is the morphological process whereby grammatical of lexical information is added to the base (root or stem). It has been the oldest and the most productive word-formation method in the English language and some other European languages. “Prefixation” means addition of a prefix to make a new word, while “suffixation” means adding a suffix to a word. The word “unfaithful” is result of both prefixation and suffixation. “Conversion” (called sometimes “full conversion”) is a word-formation process by which a word is altered from one part of speech into another without the addition (or deletion) of any morpheme. “Partial conversion” is also alteration when a word of one word-class appears in a function which is characteristic of another word-class, e.g., “ the wealthy” (=wealthy people). ”Compounding” is so complex a word-formation process as far as English is concerned that there is no formal criterion that can be used for the definition of it, though it may mean simply that two words or more come together used as one lexical item, like “dustbin”
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      What is blending, abbreviation and back formation? “Blending” is a relatively complex form of compounding in which two roots are blended by joining the initial part of the first root and the final part of the second root, or by joining the initial parts of the two roots, e.g., smog
→
smoke+fog, boatel
→
boat + hotel, etc. “Abbreviation”, also called in some cases “clipping”, means that a word that seems unnecessarily long is shortened, usually by clipping either the front or the back part of it, e.g., telephone
→
phone, professor
→
prof., etc. Broadly speaking, abbreviation includes acronyms that are made up from the first letters of the long name of an organization, e.g., World Bank
→
WB, European Economic Community
→
EEC, etc. Other examples of acronyms can be found with terminologies, to be read like one word, e.g., radio detecting and ranging
→
radar. Test of English as a Foreign Language
→
TOEFL , etc. “Back-formation” refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by detecting an imagined affix from a longer form already present in the language. It is a special kind of metanalyais, combined with analogical creation, e.g., editor
→
edit, enthusiasm
→
enthuse, etc
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      What is analogical creation? What is borrowing? The process of “analogical creation”, as one of the English tendencies in English word-formation, refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, “marathon” appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modern English created such words as “telethon”, “talkthon”, etc. Analogy may create single words (e.g., sunrise-moonrise, earthrise, etc.; earthquake-starquake, youthquake, etc.) and phrases (e.g., environmental pollution-sound pollution, air pollution, cultural pollution, etc.).
“Borrowing” means the English language borrowed words from foreign languages, which fall in four categories: aliens, denizens, translation-loans and semantic borrowings. “Aliens” are foreign loans that still keep their alien shapes, i. e., morphological and phonological features, e.g., “elite”, “coup détat”, “coupé”, etc.(from French). “Deniens” , also foreign words, have transformed their foreign appearance, i.e., they have been Angolcized (or Americanized), e. g., “get” (a Scandinavian borrowing), “theater” (a French loan), etc. “Hybrids” are also denizens, because they are words made up of two parts both from foreign soil, such as “sociology” (“socio-” from French and –logy from Greek). “Translation-loans” are words imported by way of translation, e. g., “black humor” from French(“humor noir”), “found object” form French ,too (“object trouve”), etc. Finally, semantic borrowings have acquired new meaning under the influence of language or languages other than the source tongue. For example, “gift” mean “the price of a wife ” in Old English (450-1150AD), and after the semantic borrowing of the meaning of “gift or present” of the Scandinavian term “gipt”, it meant and still means “gift” in the modern sense of it