Is it the same for Arabic and Chinese as it is for Tamil? I'm not sure. I know for Tamil it is a severe paucity of written symbols for the various sounds in the language. So the same symbol is used to represent the sounds cha, sa, sha, and ja in the symbol set of the traditional script. More recently, symbols have been added to 'fill the gap' but they are clearly demarcated as 'outside sounds'.
The little I know of the simplified Chinese character set is that it is a set of 2 dozen or so pictograms that are then combined with each other to get other pictograms for other sounds. I know nothing about the Arabic script. Could anyone else elaborate or correct my notions?
