@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.
In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system
In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system