Language
The first chapter of the book Difficult Characters: Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing, edited by Mary S. Erbaugh, Ohio State University, is The Ideographic Myth, by John DeFrancis, University of Hawaii.
The concept of ideographic writing is most seductive. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their messages directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely, ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death’s head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren’t Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without connection to sound? Aren’t they, thus, an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is a resounding no! Chinese characters are a phonetic—not ideographic—system of writing, as I have attempted to show in great detail elsewhere. In short, there never has been—and never can be—such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.