For example , in Yue, mai dan can mean pay the restaurant bill or buy eggs, depending on tone. Chinese characters, called kanji, are based on ancient pictographs . Over the years, most have also gained a second element indicating pronunciation, and so have become associated with specific syllables . Thus, they are evolving away from visual representation and toward phonetics. Writing foreign words in Chinese entails assembling kanji that are pronounced something like the newcomers syllables.
Trouble is, kanji convey ideas, too.
Usually they just generate a new, phonetically-unrelated term. Pepsi eventually took this route . Rendering foreign personal names into Chinese is a similarly refined art. Chinese Internet users sometimes turn to Romanisation and graphic text , with the usual underwhelming results. Platform differences further complicate matters.