Chinese was never an ideograph based language to begin with. Yes, most characters have that somewhere in their origin, but there's so much corruption, change of

Chinese was never an ideograph based language to begin with. Yes, most characters have that somewhere in their origin, but there's so much corruption, change of meaning and borrowing of sound going on all through history that you really don't get anywhere using ideographs. Example in Mandarin: 我不知道 : I don't know. But in ideographs: weapon flower root arrow mouth foot head.