Ideographic myth

Peter DuPonceau, the American 19th century scholar, refuted the opinion still popular in the West that Chinese writing is 'an ocular method of communicating ideas, entirely independent of speech, and which, without the intervention of speech, conveys ideas through the sense of vision directly to the mind. Hence it's called ideographic, in contradistinction from the phonographic or alphabetical system of writing'. Instead DuPonceau argues that the Chinese system of writing is not, as has been supposed, ideographic. Its characters do not represent ideas, but words. Ideographic writing is a creature of the imagination, and cannot exist, but for very limited purposes, which do not entitle it to the name of writing. All writing, then, must be a direct representation of the spoken language, and cannot present ideas to the mind abstracted from it. All writing, then, represents language in some of its elements, which are words, syllables, and simple sounds. (DuPonceau 1838)