That is not how Chinese writing works; characters represent morphemes, which are smaller than words. There are tens of thousands of words required for proficiency in a language, but only a few thousand required symbols for proficiency in writing Chinese. ("Words” here also counts different inflections of a single stem word as the same )
Almost all writing that we know of started out with pictures, which became pictograms (where there was a standard way of drawing a picture to represent something) then logograms (where the pictures stopped having to be recognisable).
Look into Sumerian cuneiform and the evolution of some of the symbols to see this in action; it’s fascinating. This writing system then became partially syllabic, where symbols could also stand for the sound of the thing they originally represented, which is again a common way for writing systems to evolve.
The exceptions are things like Korean, which was invented from scratch: but not independently.
Hegar@fedia.io 1 day ago
The chinese kinda did just make a character for each word though.
Modern chinese uses plenty of words with multiple characters but Old chinese didn't really. So character = word was much closer to the truth around the time of the oracle bone inscriptions.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
OK, but if we’re talking about origins then the Latin script ultimately descends from Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were also originally pictographic, hence 1:1 symbol:word (but evolved and so were much more complicated than just pictographs when they stopped being used)
Hegar@fedia.io 1 day ago
At it's origins, the Latin script was an alphabet, not 1:1 symbol to word.
You have to go back through a chain of different scripts for different languages from different cultures that influenced it to get to heiroglyphs.
Chinese characters were logograms invented for Chinese and are logograms used for Chinese today. At their origin they were pretty much symbol = word and it mostly still is.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Logograms like Chinese characters are not 1:1 symbol to word; they stand for morphemes, not words. Some words are morphemes, but most words consist of more than one.
Chinese script evolved from a pictographic script, just as the Latin script evolved from a pictographic script. You have to go through a chain in either case.