Comment by tokinonagare

> Sometimes it’s mashing two previously unrelated ‘words’ together (aka the tons of compound characters in Chinese), other times it’s coming up with something completely new.

That's not how it works. Most Chinese characters stem from a character C having a pronunciation A referring to a meaning M being used to note another word of meaning M' with same pronunciation A (sometimes slightly different A'). This of course doesn't scale really well, hence the existence of determiners in logographic scripts, which are words used without their pronunciations placed before or after another to give a semantic clue. The innovation of Chinese (which I think is why it's still an efficient script today) was to incorporate the determiner in the character itself to give birth to a character C' where a part refer to the pronunciation and another acts as the determiner, instead of padding the main text with (a lot of) determiners.