Re:Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimi...
by barry-cotter on Sunday February 03, 2019 @07:50AM
(#19069316)
Less than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading.
If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start.
For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.
Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.