So the group proposed assigning one code to each character with a common meaning in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, even though, in practice, the same ideogram is often written differently by different nationalities.

CNN: COMMUNICATION

In the previous century, Jesuit missionaries had brought back the first substantial accounts of the Chinese language, and many philosophers were taken with the notion that its characters signified concepts rather than sounds, and that a single ideogram could have the same meaning to people all over East Asia, despite sounding completely different in each tongue.

NEWYORKER: Utopian for Beginners