To write fish in chinese you write a pictogram. That pictogram is an image of a fish, except the image has evolved over the millennia to be unrecognisable.
The English word "fish" on the other hand, is not a pictogram, and its evolution has not been primarily visual. Instead it has undergone evolution in pronunciation, which has indirectly affected how the written word "looks".
No, to write the word for fish, you write the character pronounced "Yú" which happens to be 魚. Chinese speakers don't see that and think "that looks like a fish". They think "that sounds like Yú". Just as when you see the letter F you think of the sound, not that it looks like a hook: Phoenician 𐤅 - wāw. (Or if you know that the Latin root is piscis: 𐤐 - pē, that means mouth.) And before you point out that a Chinese speaker would describe 魚 as "the character for fish" remember that an English speaker when asked to spell a word might say "F as in fish."
Like I said, all written scripts if you go back far enough started with pictograms. But that was many millennia ago. Their evolved descendants are divided into alphabetic or syllabic scripts, both using the symbols to represent sounds but with a different granularity.
And really, Firefox spell-check, you're not going to recognize "millennia"? What's wrong with you?
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To write fish in chinese you write a pictogram. That pictogram is an image of a fish, except the image has evolved over the millennia to be unrecognisable.
The English word "fish" on the other hand, is not a pictogram, and its evolution has not been primarily visual. Instead it has undergone evolution in pronunciation, which has indirectly affected how the written word "looks".
No, to write the word for fish, you write the character pronounced "Yú" which happens to be 魚. Chinese speakers don't see that and think "that looks like a fish". They think "that sounds like Yú". Just as when you see the letter F you think of the sound, not that it looks like a hook: Phoenician 𐤅 - wāw. (Or if you know that the Latin root is piscis: 𐤐 - pē, that means mouth.) And before you point out that a Chinese speaker would describe 魚 as "the character for fish" remember that an English speaker when asked to spell a word might say "F as in fish."
Like I said, all written scripts if you go back far enough started with pictograms. But that was many millennia ago. Their evolved descendants are divided into alphabetic or syllabic scripts, both using the symbols to represent sounds but with a different granularity.
And really, Firefox spell-check, you're not going to recognize "millennia"? What's wrong with you?