G'day Bradley Bell, Thank you for your question. I don't believe so. Indeed, languages with alphabets make it much easier to print documents and convey your message to thousands of people at one time. Even though printing was invented in China, it really took off when it became known in Europe and used to print the Bible and other books. Regards

1) The main goal of modern standard pictograms is to represent an object with a picture which could tell the person that the represented objects are present here, and suggest also some associations which could be interesting. For instance a knife and a fork would suggest a meal possibility such as a restaurant. The big advantage of a pictogram is that it is language insensitive (but not always fully culture insensitive), you wouldn't even need to know a language to understand it. The disadvantage is that it is not always easy to design a good ideogram and that many of them are still unknown from many people. Because of this, most of the first written languages were based on pictograms. Probably started written language with pictograms. However, we developed some concepts which could not be represented very easily with pictograms: ideas. So we started to use also ideograms. 2) "A pictogram (also spelled pictogramme) or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is a basis of cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphs, which uses drawings also as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes. Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). They were used by the ancient Chinese culture since around 5000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 2000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania. Pictograms are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram 3) "A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds. Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms". Strictly speaking, however, ideograms represent ideas directly rather than words and morphemes, and none of the logogrammatical systems described here is truly ideographic." At some time, the logogram based chinese writing culture needed some other kind of words, which could not easily been represented, either with pictograms or with ideograms. "There are no purely logogrammatical language systems in existence today. A common myth is that Chinese is a logogrammatical language. Though many characters have associated meanings, nearly all Chinese words involve combinations of characters. Only a small minority of words in Chinese involve single characters. Additionally, characters are made up of sub-character radicals that can also cue pronunciation and meaning. Only the most basic monosyllabic words in Chinese could be considered logogrammatical." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram 3) As a conclusion, I think that a notion presented as a well known pictogram will always be communicated faster than with the corresponding, well known word. But probably we cannot use them for our whole communication.