The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages.
For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?
The ideographs were important in that they could tie together vastly different spoken languages in the same family. Because the writing was unified, all the spoken variants had their own influence on it by way of traders and administrators, and successful changes by proxy affected the speech of other regions. This meant that all the different places effectively evolved their languages around a virtual core based on the communications of the literate class - even the phonetic-based parts; and they could do it peacefully and continuously, constantly realigning their definitions without legal or violent coercion, uninterrupted by the constant evolution of the whole group of spoken languages.
For example, French has had a great influence on English, and they both use the Latin alphabet. Would such influence have been possible in the same time without violent conquest, given the alphabetic system of writing?