What countries have symbols instead of letters?

Answer 1

Ideographs: There are three countries which are famous for their ideographic writing: China, Japan, and Taiwan.

However, many Asian alphabets look like symbols even if they are not. There are four different recognized forms of an alphabet. All four exist in Asia, although only one type is typically familiar to Americans and Europeans. Additionally, there are several languages in Asia which use ideographs or symbols that replace words.

Four Alphabets:

Traditional Alphabet: The Roman Alphabet and the English Language is a perfect example. Vowels and Consonants have equal presence. Asian languages that use a traditional alphabet are Turkish, Georgian, Armenian, Kazakh, Tajik, etc.

Abugida: This is an alphabet where vowel representation is mandatory, but is represented by diacritics. The dominant alphabet of this type in Asia is the Devangari alphabet in India which is used for several major Indian languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Gujrati.

Abjad: This is an alphabet with only consonants. Vowels can be written, but are usually not written and not necessary. The dominant alphabet of this type in Asia is the Arabic alphabet which is used for Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu among other languages. The Hebrew alphabet is also an Abjad.

Syllabary: This is when a letter will have all of the sounds to make an entire "syllable" sound. I.e. one symbol will represent "ka" instead of "k". The most famous syllabaries in Asia are the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets of Japan. The Hangul Alphabet of Korea is a hybrid Alphabet-Syllabary since each syllable block can be taken apart to reveal alphabet components, but the letters cannot be written without the entire syllable known.

Answer 2

Countries that use symbols instead of letters include China, Japan, and South Korea, which have writing systems based on characters or symbols that represent words or meanings rather than individual sounds or letters.