Pictographic

Most sinograms are not pictographic, like the sign for "tree." The majority of sinograms have a "meaning radical" together with a "sound hint radical." Sinograms are logograms.

At the end of last month, May of 2014, Bratislav, of Croatian descent, had left the Lulu Island neighbourhood, he having bought a new house and abandoning his slender townhouse. One of our last meetings in the neighbourhood was at the Rideau School field. We discussed plenty. Russia and China had been "State Capitalist" regimes and not "Communist" as they claimed to be. There was an alien "spacecraft" hovering invisibly above the grassy field; oh no, it was some kind of "portal"; oh no, it was an "incorporeal being." Many East Asian logograms, or "Sinograms," had a categorizing radical along with a hinting phonetic radical; they were not all pictographic. Daoists, I said, liked to be like a simple driftwood. There were aliens aplenty, Bratislav repeated. That day on the field last month, the thousands of dandelions were abundant with cloudy tufts of their soon-to-fly seeds.

Only two words in English possess a bare minimum resemblance to that of pictographics: eye (two es are the eyes, and the y is the nose) and bed (two vertical strokes from b and d compose the frame of the bed).