I think Chinese is really not a pictorial language either; using your apt description, it's like if every character was a "shortcut". Harder to learn, but still

I think Chinese is really not a pictorial language either; using your apt description, it's like if every character was a "shortcut". Harder to learn, but still fairly standard in conveying meaning as far as modern languages go. Some characters are still visually similar to what they represent, but at this point they're mostly a bit of a stretch. A true pictorial language would convey most meaning through the symbols themselves, and I don't think any modern languages fulfill that definition. Maybe sign languages are the closest thing we have to pictorial language, in terms of the way some things are expressed symbolically?