Fascinating how some languages developed as phonetic and others as symbolic. It’s actually a complex abstraction to create a language based on sounds, with multiple symbols forming words vs assigning a single symbol as representing a word. It’s on the level of abstraction of zero in mathematics.
Yes, the development of the abstraction of sounds to a symbol was an amazing breakthrough in human development, wasn’t it? We had probably hit the end of the road in development with pictographs and the next leap in civilization required a symbolic phonetic language.
Hangul (Korean) is a pretty neat blend of the two with each character intended to be a standardized representation of the position of the mouth when they character is spoken.