Has anyone ever created a language that's drawn graphically? I don't mean writing (just representative of a real language) but something more like sign language is to hand movement. But with doodles.
umm...Hieroglyphs (sp?)?
Also,kanji is kind of likr that-one character means one thing ,if i understand what you're asking for.
I suppose it'd be more like sentence diagrams. Or probably exactly like sentence diagrams.
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
And of course the Chinese characters (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja or whatever you might know then as...), as has already been mentioned.
Maybe back in the Shang dynasty, but now most hangzi have lost that kind of 'pictographic' meaning. Although the root can still be identified that way (kinda) in many.
I have, actually.
tl;dr: I was trying to make up my own sign language, and started to do drawings to remember it, and then I ended up abandoning the sign language and building on the drawings, and I wound up with a weird 'pictolanguage' as you call it.
First, I'd draw a somewhat detailed image of the head and often torso of a person. The person was a noun--labels determined whether they were a subject, an object, a person, an animal, a place, a thing, or an idea. Artistic embellishment could also help to define and describe the noun (drawing a rabbit instead of a human, making the person look happy or sad).
Certain areas around the face and head of the noun would be adorned with symbols to stand for things, mostly verbs. For a simple example, a circle with a dot in it on the brow of the left eye meant that the noun was looking at something. A line would be drawn from the side of the head, and at the end of the line would lie the object the noun was looking at, either as another drawing or a simplified version, such as a small box of descriptive words, or with the symbol for a perviously-defined object.
Extra symbols could be added around the picture, too, with no rigid grammatical purpose or place. V-shaped birds above something indicated that the thing below them was about to die, fall ill or disappear, upside-down yen symbols indicated that something was unlucky or dangerous (right-side-up meant it was lucky or prosperous), an airy swirl meant that the verb was happening uncontrollably.
The language was not practical at all for translating large amounts of text or for writing stories. It was best applied in describing single ideas in great detail. For that reason, I would use it to write signs and instructions.
>>5
OP never mentioned "pictographic" though.