It plays out perfectly. E.g. Chinese is one of the least phonological scripts around, and this is precisely why old texts in it are more interpretable.

Korean Hangul is not ideographic (I think what you meant by pictorial?). It's a morphophonemic alphabet that just happens to organize the basic phonemic units into larger graphemes representing whole syllables - but in a completely predictable way. And it is another example of this playing out: the original Hangul was entirely phonemic, but over time pronunciation diverged from spelling, and today it's morpho-phonemic, and even then not perfectly so. So they preserved the history at the cost of some mismatch between the spelling and the sound.

> How does that play out for languages that use characters that are pictorial.

Chinese' pictorial writing completely obfuscates the historical state of the spoken language, to the extent that in order to reconstruct older phases of the spoken Chinese language, scholars have had to inspect old Chinese loan-words in foreign languages that do preserve the old phonetic structure.

An example of this is the discovery that Chinese tones developed from earlier final-consonants, which were lost in Mandarin, but are preserved in Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. i.e: Mandarin "guó" compared with the early borrowing into Japanese : "koku", both meaning "country".

That is very interesting, and along the lines of what I was wondering. Thanks