> Now, the Han characters are ideographs. This is not a phonetic script; individual characters represent words. [At least in Chinese] Characters represent part

> Now, the Han characters are ideographs. This is not a phonetic script; individual characters represent words. [At least in Chinese] Characters represent parts of words. Some basic words consist of just one character, but others consist of several characters. Characters impart a mood to the word -- the set of words in which a character appears generally have similar meanings. I think the closest thing metaphor would be to describe characters as latin roots.