A fair number of glyphs do look like a picture of one of the words usually spelled with that glyph. And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs repres

A fair number of glyphs do look like a picture of one of the words usually spelled with that glyph. And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs represent the same syllable, and one is preferred for writing this word, and another for that word. So there is an appealing "just so" story to be told for those. But they are exceptional, and often ad hoc, drifting in and out of fashion. Chinese languages use about 1200 different syllables (some, a fair few more, e.g. with an extra tone). There is very strong pressure for any new word to be shortened to one syllable so it can be written with one glyph, in a process a little like acronyms become words in English. (E.g. laser, sonar.) This makes for a phenomenally huge overload of homophones. Having different glyphs for the same syllable helps disambiguate when writing. And, people naturally like to try to make things more mnemonic. (You must sometimes pretend to write a glyph on your hand, when talking, to to make sure you are understood, in a technical or legal context.) But glyphs for syllables, pronunciations of words, and preferred synonyms drift as in all languages. Meanwhile syllables for glyphs change on a completely different schedule. So whatever correspondence maybe once existed, there is very little of it left. Many Chinese people like to think they can read things written two thousand years ago, because the glyphs are often hardly changed, but they must confabulate because so much else has changed. The huge number of homophones mean you can invent a plausible meaning for practically any sequence of glyphs. The numbers are instructive. Mandarin has tens of thousands of words, mostly of one syllable, but only ~1200 syllables. Most people can read several thousand glyphs, but write from memory rather fewer. So even if a glyph "should" be used for a word, you might not remember how to write it, and must write one that sounds the same, instead. Imagine this drifting over centuries as different glyphs come in and out of fashion. Despite all this, even small children have no difficulty understanding and expressing these languages. The fluid meanings make for glorious wordplay like we can never experience.