Chinese characters — radicals and phonetic parts

Even a 'pictographic' script decomposes: ~80% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds — a RADICAL giving the meaning-domain plus a phonetic part hinting the sound. The water radical (氵) marks 河 (river), 湖 (lake), 海 (sea); and words compose from characters: 电 (electric) + 话 (speech) = 电话 (telephone) — the very same 'far-sound' idea English builds from Greek. A few hundred radicals organize tens of thousands of characters, and the ~3,000 most frequent cover the vast majority of text. Attributed empirical (the radical system is discovered, its meanings measured) — but the break-down/rebuild is unmistakable: even here, small parts, richly combined.