Pictographs and Words as Pictures and Phoenixes

#Pictographs and Words as Pictures and #Phoenixes

This imperfect image comes after some editing from a textbook of chinese characters showing six types of Chinese Script

yes I know I missed a few spots and probably deleted too much and the eraser tool on one character  ...

for some reason the scripts are aligned oddly two forms of seal script then li shu then xing then regular then full cao frankly if I had been doing the layout I would have shown kai modern simplified then cao and xing then on the right li and the two archaic forms.

However imperfect as the image and my editing was (its an old file form when I'd had less practice with a eraser tool) it does give some idea of the progression from pictograph to ideogram over the centuries.

So is the "word" a picture even in a modern form?

An Asian or other scholar educated in calligraphy and radicals would see a tail and head under the vault of heaven in all the forms and a calligrapher might state the cursive form is both a picture and a word representing the phoenix in flight

I suspect someone being exposed to chinese scripts for the first time if asked which they think is a phoenix would pick the second character from the right ?

Which would you?