Watch The Animation The Evolution Of Characters

Chinese characters are remarkably similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. They were both created thousands of years ago. They were both originally pictographic and ideographic. They both developed over time to allow new words to be written phonetically using whole characters/glyphs. And they both spawned off modified forms of writing that were purely sound-based.

In the West, the offspring of hieroglyphs include the Greek and Roman alphabets that are read from left to right, as well as the abjads of Arabic and Hebrew that are read from right to left.

In the East, the offspring of Chinese characters are the Japanese Kana syllabaries.

How remarkable it is that the same evolution in the use of writing  - from conveying pictures to conveying sounds - should have occurred independently on opposite sides of the world.

(Nota bene: If you love languages, you may already know that the Egyptians used some hieroglyphs to code for sounds alone. The up and down squiggles of the hieroglyph for "water", for example, can be used to write the "N" sound in hieroglyphs. However, you may not know that the Proto-Sinaitic peoples who borrowed hieroglyphs to make their own sound-based alphabet completely ignored this Egyptian way of doing things and, instead, used the glyphs/letters to represent the sound of the Egyptian word, not the sound the Egyptians associated with the glyph. So, while the Egyptians used the squiggles of the word for "water" to code for the "N" sound, the Proto-Sinaitic peoples used the same symbol to code for the "M" sound in "Mu" - the word for water.

Every letter you write has thousands of years of history inside it.:)