A semantic encoding system?

[Mauro]

Being based in China and very familiar with Chinese characters, it made me think of the following hypothesis: may be the individual glyphs do not represent sounds or letters in the normal alphabetic sense. Rather, they would function more like the strokes used to build characters: meaningless on their own phonetically, but combined according to structural rules to create distinct semantic units. 

Yeah, it's surely one of the many possibilities, and a nice idea. It's functionally similar to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hypothesis, where glyph 'chunks' represent concepts, which are then concatenated to form bigger semantic units.