If English was written like Chinese

[tjoneslo]

http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

This was an article I came across on Hacker News. It describes in detail how English would look like if written as an idographic text (i.e. little pictures) rather than an alphabet.

There is enough detail here so if you wanted to invent alien pictograms, it gives a system for deriving them. So your weird alien script can have a system to it, and be translated back into a known language.

 

[BlackBat242]

It would be nice if the author of the article was a bit more informed. His very first example:

One way would be to use hanzi directly, as the Japanese do. For instance, we'd write "work" as , and "ruler" as . Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. "gung-ho" would be , and "tycoon" as .

You can already see that this is going to be tricky. We've just given two readings, for instance-- /wrk/ and /gûng/

(he uses the same symbol for "work" and "gung")

Gung is a word meaning "work" or "pull" - "gung ho" means "pull together" or "work together" - so there is only one meaning for that symbol actually in use.