Arabic isn't just for Arabs

Running

Horse

Victor Mair posts a story on Language Log about the numerous scripts used in writing in Indonesia. Seems not everyone uses the same writing for the same language. Some people in China use Arabic script to write Chinese. I think my whole language applecart has been upset. 

When I first learned about Chinese writing way back in elementary school, the idea I got was that each pictograph was a symbol for something, like there could be a symbol for a horse and a symbol for running and if you put the two together they meant 'running horse'.

Sometime recently (like since I retired), I got the idea that pictographs also represented sounds, which was unrelated to the name of symbol. So if you took the sounds from the horse and running symbols you might get a completely unrelated word, like 'dog butt'. 

Now I'm really confused. When someone says 'dog butt', are they talking about a dog butt, or are they talking about a running horse? And how they heck would you know? Well, if you grew up speaking Chinese it would be obvious, well, I hope it would be.

But through all this, I thought Chinese pictographs were used for the Chinese language and Arabic script was used for the Arabic language. But evidently that is not always the case. Could you write an English sentence using Arabic script, and if you could, could anybody understand it? We have English spellings of some Arabic words / names in the news, but they are pretty meaningless as they seem to be full of apostrophes and the apostrophes are all in places that would never show up in an English word.

Me, I think we should call the Northern Capital of China Peking like Hollywood intended.