Before the development of modern scientific nomenclature, natural philosophers used logograms to represent the concepts of their trade. These logograms constituted a library of symbols that could be repurposed, as for example by Linnaeus, who used ♄ for woody plants, ♃ for herbaceous perennials, ♂ for biennials, and ☉︎ for annual plants, or extended by derivation, as with the alchemical symbols 🜆 for aqua regia and 🜅 for aqua fortis, straightforwardly derived by ligature from the logogram 🜄 aqua and the Latin letters R and F. (Here cf. the derivation of the Linear B ideogram 𐂓 from the syllabic characters 𐀏𐀡.) While in some cases these characters had clear derivations, in others they were functionally unanalyzable, as with the symbol for lead, ♄, originally a ligature of the first two characters in the Greek name of Saturn, Κρόνος.
They also had different meanings in different contexts: Linnaeus used ♂ (elsewhere meaning 'iron' or 'Mars') for both biennials (an arbitrary extension) and male plants, and ♀ (elsewhere meaning 'copper' or 'Venus') for female plants.
Some of these symbols are still used today: the symbols for 'male' and 'female' are widely understood, and new astronomical symbols have been created for Earth and the minor planets. However, in some German alchemical manuscripts, the practice of logographic writing combined with the practice (also found in many English manuscripts) of writing Latin in antiqua as vs. the usual blackletter combined to produce a triscriptal system, almost like Japanese:
In German, verbs loaned from Latin often take the infinitive suffix -ieren; note the words 'calcini𝔯𝔢𝔱' and 'ſepari𝔯𝔢𝔱', with Antiqua stems and blackletter endings.
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