In China, pictograms evolved into ideograms, so that a given symbol might represent not just some material item in the world but an idea such as love or justice. These ideograms might be compared to mathematical symbols. When two people see a mark like 3 or 7,432, they’d say it differently, if one was French, say, and the other Russian, but they’d take exactly the same meaning from it. The idea exists quite separately from the sound. As this script developed, it became possible to express in writing meanings that actually couldn’t be expressed in speech, which is to say, the script became a
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