While we are continuing this chain of pedantry, few characters are in fact ideographic. Mainly the the oldest ones. Most are "Phono-semantic" i.e. a combination

While we are continuing this chain of pedantry, few characters are in fact ideographic. Mainly the the oldest ones. Most are "Phono-semantic" i.e. a combination of "sounds like this, but means like this". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati... BTW I recall later Egyption hieroglyphs were not strictly ideographic either, leading up to the Phonetician alphabet. I wonder how similar that process was.