For example: 漢字 from both 日本語 (JP) and 中文 (ZH) are derivative from semantic concepts based on what they saw around them (when both languages were first created), kind of like this:
There’s more examples of it I can come up with such as the following:
Also, both languages allow this writing orientation (R-L vertical):
I mean, they even have words that are “swapable” (mainly how characters are positioned but retain the same definition) as shown:
The thing is, both languages are logographic which allows for this form of conceptualization regarding vocabulary based on “shape”:
That is in contrast with languages that use alphabets (as those are based on sound) while 日本語 (JP) and 中文 (ZH) are “pictorial” if that makes sense, meaning each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.
Boobs
IMO the “visual concept” is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.
each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.
And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.
they even have words that are “swapable”
In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. “она пошла домой” (she went home, neutral), “домой она пошла” (she went home), “пошла она домой” (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.
alphabets (as those are based on sound)
Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is… Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.
I’m not sure I’m replying correctly to your question, but the Roman letters can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphs and those were based on physical forms.
My favourite is the ox head - alp - which was representation for the letter A. If you look at A, you will notice, that if you flip it on its head, it looks like a simplified ox head. That it directly traced back to “alp”. I don’t remember the origin of each letter, I have followed a guy called Useful Charts for yeeeeears and he made a video on the evolution of the alphabet and also made a poster that you could/can(?) buy. Which is so cool, honestly.
Not all letters can be traced all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, but a surprising amount can and they all represent objects that the common man recognized at the time and it helped with comprehension.
In case you’re interested in the evolution of the Roman alphabet, you can check out this video by Useful Charts, or if you’re more interested in just seeing it, you can just look at the poster he made here:
🇺🇲👍✈️🏢🏢
“Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.
You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.
I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.
A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.
The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.
It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.
The word
bed
Looks like a 🛌🏿.
Boob has the top-down view “B”, the front view “oo”, and the side view “b” of boobs.
There’s at least one example: | || || |_
If you mean with their current alphabets not really. If you mean making a new writing system why not? You’ll still have trouble representing non-physical concepts but Chinese/Japanese can’t represent everything accurately either.
Some of those looks like stretches
All of those look like stretches. Like if I imposed the small dipper constellation on top of a crack pipe and said that’s what it was.
It’s more that the characters have been evolving for a few millennia so they don’t look exactly as they did originally. For instance 山 meaning mountain was originally three distinct mountains and 目 used to be an eye.
✅, 🧭⬅️ 💬 👍 🖼️📝.
☝️ 💩 🔥🔥🔥
Can western languages be conveyed visually? Mostly no, it would be a huge stretch as the writing system isn’t based around visual inspiration, just like you mentioned. But tbf, I think with Chinese & Japanese, you’ll find many words that aren’t easily conveyed visually either, or that have heavily transformed into obscurity over time.
Not anymore. If you go back to ancient times pictograms existed. But as time marched on those got replaced with other alphabets or a way more schematic way of writing.
And historians are guessing.
Supposedly the Hungarian ancient runes are coming from so many places and some in bc3000 were kinda hieroglyphic - but todays way of writing has absolutely nothing left of it.
Tho Hungarian is a special butterfly bc technically not European but Asian Uralic language. And those runes coming from not Europe either.
*Edit: fixed an auto correctionWe have 69. In Turkish there is 31, which means masturbation. It is pictographic when you’re male and right handed.
Interesting read.
I think parts of Indo-European languages (nouns, verbs) can be represented by icons the same way a logographic language can be spelled out phonetically. The questions are: (1) how do you represent other kins of words, and (2) what icons to use 😵💫🤷🏾♂
Yes. They kind of still are, because the Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Hebrew scripts ultimately derive from Egyptian hieroglyphics, and hieroglyphics are even more pictorial than Chinese characters.
(Brahmic, Tibetan, and traditional Mongolian scripts also go back to Egyptian, but they aren’t western).
Interesting. Never thought about it this way.
First thing to come to my mind: logograms. &, %, +, @. They are quite similar to Kanji. They each have different “readings”, like “&”, which can be “et”, but also “and” or “und” or “y”, depending on the kontext of the reader. So it is not phonetical, but defined pictorally.
Also, maybe Onomatopoesia? Buzz. Hiss. Sizzle. Pop. Slurp. Tick-tock. But I think that does not really meet your criteria.
Or concepts like a U-turn, T-shirt, V-neck, A-frame. They use the shape of a letter as a descriptive element.
And the last thing that comes to my mind would be zigzag (GER: Zickzack). It kind of depicts a broken, alternating line. It’s not really fully visual, but the reduplication and the harsh contrast of syllables try to immitate a stark alternation.
Maybe “synaesthesia” is a distant topic that might interest you, although it is a very broad field. Visual concepts may be distantly related to phonetic concepts and vice versa.
