[maxdamantus]

Indeed, my understanding (which is backed up by your link) is that the hieroglyphs aren't just pictograms that try to draw the meaning but they tend to have particular pronunciations, and the selection of glyphs will usually depend on both the sound and the meaning of the word.

I guess Chinese characters work similarly, where eg, each character has a particular sound in Mandarin (with some characters having the same sound), but you spell words using certain characters based on the (sometimes historical) semantic association of components (radicals) within each character.

I'll admit I'm not an expert in either system, so sorry if either description seems like an oversimplification (I'm pretty sure there are exceptions in both cases).

This also leads to one of my favourite tables on Wikipedia [0], showing correspondences between various scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Arabic/Hebrew. Not all hieroglyphs are included, but you can see that each letter in Arabic/Hebrew ultimately derives from some hieroglyph which would have had a similar sound. The name of the Arabic letter ع sounds the same as the Arabic word for "eye" (ʿayn, عين) and the corresponding hieroglyph also looks like an eye.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Table_of_l...

[Y_Y]

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2023/literal-chinese-translatio...

You might then enjoy a list of these "accidental semantics" acquired by foreign country names, which are* rough transliterations, usually from local or English name.

I can't find the nice source I originally had, so here's a stochastic patrot's approximation:

  United States 美国 Měiguó Beautiful Country
  China 中国 Zhōngguó Middle Country
  Japan 日本 Rìběn Origin of the Sun
  Germany 德国 Déguó Virtuous Country
  India 印度 Yìndù India
  United Kingdom 英国 Yīngguó Heroic Country
  France 法国 Fǎguó Law Country
  Italy 意大利 Yìdàlì Italy
  Canada 加拿大 Jiānádà Canada
  South Korea 韩国 Hánguó Han Country

* Obviously CJK etc countries already had names

[fluoridation]

Most of those are just phonetic approximations using convenient characters. I'm not sure I'd say the names have any semantic content. The names for China, Korea, and Japan are the names the ancient Chinese gave them. China is the "middle" or "center" country because it's the country of the people who named it. Japan is the origin of the sun because it's to the East of China. And of course the Han are what Koreans called themselves. Nothing accidental about any of those names.