After gleening through the googled information, I have to say that I personally believe that, foundationally, all language is pictographic in nature.
For example: While recently in France, I saw a medieval cart. My french husband told me that in French, the cart was called a tomble (I don't know the proper spelling). Thinking about the French word I could see how the English word tumble could be a derivative of that French word for cart. A child tumbles; a tumble-weed; something tumbles down.
I am by no means a linguist or one who studies language in any fashion. But, language fascinates me.
When reading a book, Genesis in the Chinese Language, I became aware that the symbols of Chinese are made up of radicals or elements of pictures that are combined and recombined to get new symbols. For example: the symbol for "boat" = three elements/radicals
the concept of vessel
the concept of eight
the concept of mouths/persons
In Genesis, Noah and his family constituted:
the concept of vessel
the concept of eight
the concept of mouths/persons
The book is very intriguing (to me) in that the author states that the chinese language is the oldest pictographic language still in use much as it has always been used. At the dispersion of Babylon (when the world was supposedly dominated by one language), the peoples that went to the area that became Chinese were geographically "locked in" and their original culture has "lasted" longer than others' original culture. The author of Genesis in the Chinese Language believes Chinese to be similar to snapshots of original event observers.
Another is example for the word light :
two radicals:
man
on fire
According to biblical account: pre-fall Adam was covered with an eminating light referenced as the Shekinah glory of God, a man on fire. In some biblical teaching, that loss of light was the nakedness of Adam and Eve.
I say all this to add to the question of, "do we think word first or picture first?".
