[moufestaphio]

Chinese characters (In Japan they referred to as Kanji), are ideographic rather than phonetic.

This means they represent an idea (or concept?) instead of a sound. The meaning is completely divorced from the pronunciation. In Japanese each character usually has at least two 'readings' for pronunciation onyomi (chinese-origin reading) and kunyomi (Japanese reading).

But often have even more than that, and specifically with peoples names the readings some times feel completely arbitrary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings

Basically, there are multiple ways to get the same 'sound' from different kanji, or get a different 'sound' the same kanji.

[Ericson2314]

While we are continuing this chain of pedantry, few characters are in fact ideographic. Mainly the the oldest ones. Most are "Phono-semantic" i.e. a combination of "sounds like this, but means like this".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

BTW I recall later Egyption hieroglyphs were not strictly ideographic either, leading up to the Phonetician alphabet. I wonder how similar that process was.

[cyphar]

GP probably meant logographic rather than ideographic (and kanji are a logographic writing system), because they were making a comparison to phonographic writing systems.

I imagine most non-linguist nerds (myself included) would confuse the distinction between logographic writing systems and ideographs.