The modern Chinese writing system is fully phonetic, just with extremely complex spelling. There is no pretense that characters represent ideas or words. They represent syllables.

Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no alterations to represent its own pronunciation, which was shared with the verb.

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cyberax 3 days ago | parent [-]

I speak Chinese :)

It's a mixed system with about 2 millennia of legacy. It started as logographic, then it got into phono-semantic compounds, with detours into the written-only official language (like Latin), and now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs (休，林，森), true phonosemantic compounds, and plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

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thaumasiotes 3 days ago | parent [-]

> now it's messy mix of everything. There are true logographs

Don't confuse the origin of the system with what the system is now.

Using your example, what do you see as the difference between the "logographs" 森 and 林?

Neither can be a logograph, because neither one represents a word. But even if that weren't the case, on the assumption that they are simply pictures representing concepts, how would you know which one was which?

What does it mean, to you, that the word "forest" must be written 森林 and not 森?

> and [there are] plenty purely phonetic characters that have no meaning by themselves ("bound morphemes").

...yes. 森 and 林 both belong to that category. But you've specifically contrasted them with it. I can't tell what you're thinking of.

Characters can be classified by origin, so that 森 is "从林从木", 切 is "从刀七声", and 下 is "指事". You seem to be reaching for this, but "bound morpheme" is a classification of the current use of the linguistic element, not of the origin of the way it's spelled.

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kragen 3 days ago | parent [-]

图样图森破

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thaumasiotes 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure I follow you, but it seems worth noting that those five characters are the transcription of an English phrase. (In this case, "森" is just the first half of the word "simple".)

	▲	kragen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		In this case used purely for its phonetic value, with no semantic content, so it's hard to call it logographic.