[jhedwards]

I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸 up down concave convex

[jveld]

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the misconception somewhat

[jveld]

@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.

In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system

[jhedwards]

Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.

[zardo]

>and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects.

Isn't that still the case?