Chinese characters aren't pictographs, so whether English could be written with pictographs is irrelevant to this discussion. Each Chinese character represents

Chinese characters aren't pictographs, so whether English could be written with pictographs is irrelevant to this discussion. Each Chinese character represents a syllable (in Chinese languages) or a small set of possible sequences of syllables (in Japanese). And yes, in Chinese languages, new words are created from characters that sound like the parts of the new word, all the time.