He could not: it was in an ideographic language that France had destroyed.
"In Chinese, you are drawing characters that are ideographic -- they are not linear at all".
There are more than 500 signs, many appearing to be compounds of two or more other signs, but it is not yet clear whether these signs are ideographic, logographic, or other.
As the use of phonetic alphabets in Oriental cultures is not yet widespread, they may be converted to ideographic by means of a dictionary lookup.
Since a proposal by Butinov and Knorozov in the 1950s, the majority of philologists, linguists and cultural historians have taken the line that rongorongo was not true writing but proto-writing, that is, an ideographic- and rebus-based mnemonic device, such as the Dongba script of the Nakhi people, which would in all likelihood make it impossible to decipher.
Not only is it the case that universal considerations are as important as ideographic specificity, but also the understanding of individuality is not possible without reference to some broader context.
In those cases, Dr Galantucci often saw the ideographic equivalent of a person shouting loudly in a foreign country where he does not speak the local language.
They could not, however, identify the remaining characters in the Demotic text, which, as is now known, included ideographic and other symbols alongside the phonetic ones.
The ideographic Nom script in which they were originally written gives to the words a physicality that they do not have in either modern Vietnamese or English; it is compact and gives a sense of Ho's epigrammatic skills.
Has the alphabet itself undergone an "ideographic turn", becoming "estranged from itself"?
