In Chinese at least, most characters are not pictographic, but phonetic-semantic: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all

In Chinese at least, most characters are not pictographic, but phonetic-semantic: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th... > while pictographs are pretty and easy to explain, they only make up around 5% of all characters. Phonetic-semantic components, on the other hand, make up almost 80% of all characters