What's the difference between a picture and a picture character? Why are Dongba and Sabah characters words instead of pictures?

There are obvious differences between pictures and pictures in the way of conveying information and expressing meaning.

Painting usually refers to the creation with only images or mainly images, such as painting, photography, illustration and so on. These works mainly convey information and feelings through images.

Picture text is a combination of image and text, including some illustrations, charts, signs, posters and so on. These works add words on the basis of images in order to convey information and express meaning more intuitively and clearly.

As for why Dongba and Sabah characters are regarded as characters rather than pictures, it is because they are regarded as the early forms of characters by academic research circles and have high research value. Dongba and Sabah are primitive hieroglyphs. When they convey information, they use a combination of images and a small amount of text, which is obviously different from pure pictures. Therefore, although their forms may be similar to some pure pictures, they are classified as words rather than pictures.

In a word, pictures and picture words are different in conveying information and expressing meaning, while Dongba and Sabah are regarded as early forms of words rather than pure pictures because of their unique expressions.