system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are some languages (Kanji and Traditional Chinese, for example) written as "pictures", so to speak, and western languages are based more on syllable structures? Is there a historical reason for it?

Why have some languages evolved to be picture languages, whereas western languages are usually based on syllables? It can't be random. There's got to be a certain historical reason for it.

I'm sorry if the term "picture" language is incorrect, I tried to think of a better way to describe Kanji/Trad. Chinese and this is the best I came up with. :/
gpt
Writing was independently invented in only a handful of places on earth, and all modern writing systems are descended from the ones invented in Mesopotamia and China. They actually seem to have begun similarly, using pictographs to represent first whole words, then evolving these into more abstract forms (logograms) that could be combined to create a more flexible system capable of representing abstract concepts. They then started to develop phonetic components that represented sounds rather than entire words or concepts. This is where they split. 

Mesopotamian-derived systems continued to develop more and more phonetic components and eventually dropped the logographic aspects entirely. Such systems, which have been adapted to nearly every language on earth, now use entirely phonetic components to represent only sounds and not concepts.

Chinese did not: instead more and more logograms developed, and they began to reduce some logograms to very simple abstract shapes that were then combined to build up new logograms. Sometimes phonetic components were (are) included, but each individual character is an abstract logogram representing a concept rather than a syllable or phoneme. There are some advantages to such a system, but it didn't spread as widely as the phonetic systems, partly due to cultural isolationism and partly due to geographical reasons, but mostly because it's much harder to learn than a phonetic system.