All true written languages are phonetic to some extent, even though they may not be alphabetical the way English is. Chinese characters have phonetic components indicating tone and pronunciation, Egyptian hieroglyphs are largely syllabic, Norse runes are alphabetic like English. In Chinese and Egyptian, there are purely non-phonetic symbols representing ideas (and other things like determinatives), but most have some kind of phonetic meaning (this is my understanding at least).

There's a spectrum of how phonetic a language is, where Finnish is on one end (sounds very closely align with spelling) and Chinese characters on the other, but all written languages are phonetic to some degree.

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griffzhowl 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, I would just add as clarification that from my learning of (Mandarin) Chinese, each character is unambiguously associated with a syllable (including tone), so if you know the syllable corresponding to the character, you should be able to read a sentence exactly (modulo occasional changes to the tones of some syllables to make it flow better). (If we defined "phonetic" to have that meaning then Chinese is actually very phonetic!)

The converse is not the case: Chinese is very homophonic so there are a lot of syllable (sounds) that have many different meanings and hence characters associated with them.

	▲	OskarS a day ago \| parent [-]
		I should explain a little further what I mean: there are "pure" ideograms even in English, like the & and % characters. These unambiguously refer to the words "and" and "percent", but the way they're written gives no clue whatsoever to a reader on how they're pronounced. If you had gone your entire life reading and writing English but somehow never encountered them, the way they're written is entirely unhelpful. Emoji are an even more abstract example, that don't even correspond to any word at all, just usually indicating mood or something like that. It's a common misconception that all Chinese characters are like that, but my understanding is that while there are many, many more ideograms in Chinese than English, something like 80% of the characters do in some way indicate pronunciation (even if it's just something like tone) or use the "rebus principle" or something like that. So again, it's a spectrum, but all writing systems are phonetic to some extent. Human's wouldn't be able to use it to communicate effectively otherwise. I will say that I'm not a linguist, nor can I read or write a word of Mandarin Chinese, and will happily stand corrected. This is just what I've picked up from reading books about the history and development of writing.