"I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character."
Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.
The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.
That is a great way to remember the character but it doesn't work as an explanation for why it's written that way. It is NOT a picture of the body. In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything.
The character amnesia is because the monosyllabic sound of each character doesn't not provide enough information to make it easy to remember how to write that character. (A consequence being that rote learning is practically the only way to memorize the characters.)
"In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."
Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.
Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).
I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.
I know the ancestors of Chinese characters were pictures but not the current characters (with a few unconvincing exceptions). Most of the characters now are "phono-semantic compounds".
Not to be offensive or anything but those "oh they picked that cause it looks like this" stories are bullshit. In my opinion at least. Take the example you chose 啼. That also means "wild animal cry". How does that help the picture theory? And even if this one story happens to be true, how does that explain all the other thousands of characters?
I understand that you're trying to apologize for the Chinese writing system. But there is no need. It just sucks. Horrible, hard-to-use designs are cobbled together all the time, the Chinese character system is just a particularly prominent example.
Now for a quote from David Moser's Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard speaking about learning a French word.
And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word >phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur"
Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.
The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.