Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possi

Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard. Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.