Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

Image by José-Manuel Benito, via Wikimedia Commons

Some refer to the written Chinese language as ideographic: that is, structured according to a system in which each symbol represents a particular idea or concept, whether abstract or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese characters, but only a small minority. Most of them are actually logographs, each of which represents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary ...