Can imagine the meaning, not the sound

"If I see the word, I can imagine the meaning of it but I can't imagine the sound."  Huy and I were talking about Chinese characters versus our words written in letters of the alphabet. Strange though our spelling is, we read our words as sounds first, semantic units second. Indeed, Chinese can be rendered in sound-representational ways, but only children and foreigners use this way, Huy told me. Why not use this existing alphabetic system and obviate the need for learning thousands of complicated characters? Huy was adamant: no, never, unthinkable. 

But I'm left trying to understand Huy's mental experience. Say I see a character, an image, perhaps a stylized or complexified picture of something, immediately a meaning, or a cluster of meanings, or a menu of possible meanings come to mind, but no spoken word. My tongue is not cued to do anything. A symbol could have multiple pronunciations as for instance our homonyms may have multiple meanings. Is that right--I mean about the Chinese characters? If so, does this mean that the character is independent of actual speech, floats above it like a reference grid of concepts at which certain spoken words can point but which others words could point at equally well. 

My language teaching these days is leaning more and more toward considering text as script, and that as musical. I see this as a promising approach for improving all kinds of fluency. The actual letter-stream is demoted to a bridge between speech (of writer) and speech (of reciter), with the latter seeking to enter the mind of the former through listening to the speech captured in the written word. A book in my hand is an avatar of the author. There's some voice behind any text. 

But not a Chinese text, I guess. Characters present themselves, sequences become combinations, arguments take shape, references proliferate, and all diagrammatically rather than discursively. I'm sure I'm way off...but I was struck by what Huy said. There are possible implications here to be explored. Is the language of mathematics more like Chinese or alphabetized languages?  What about engineering?  What about advertising?  What about movies?  Mmmm, much to think on.