It would be a useful thing if the letters of our alphabets represented the basic thoughts that their word's meanings are built on, in addition to the sounds that their word's pronunciation is built on.

Wouldn't it get really confusing to have to think about both? Also, couldn't that lead to unpronounceable words?

It'd require too large an alphabet. The reason our alphabet is so useful is because there is no connection between the letters and the meanings of the words. Writing systems that work as you suggest are significantly larger and harder to use.

well, this was claimed mainly in response to the one before this one. besides:

1. it would be harder to learn, yes, but more useful once learned. not like Chinese, though; oddly enough this has never been tried. or at least used.

2. "...our alphabets represented the basic thoughts that THEIR WORDS' MEANINGS are built on..."
i didn't say the letters' meanings.

No, it wouldn't be more useful. It'd be far, far less useful. The alphabet would end up being as long as the number of basic thoughts we have. And thus it'd end up as a pictographic language that then combines a few pictographs into larger concepts. And then for complicated concepts, they'd have to combine in ways that didn't pronounce well, which would make the written language have no match-up to the spoken language or the spoken language would have concepts that couldn't be said because they'd be unpronouncable.

It'd be a vast loss in our ability to communicate.

at a basic enough level there could very well be twenty-some basic thoughts that corespond to the twenty-some basic sounds that humans use in speech, that is what kabhlah (sp?) seems to believe, they seem to believe that the Hebrew alphabet works something like the way i described (although they haven't convinced me that it actually does).
attacking the same kind of thinking from a completely different direction, search "semantic primes" for a pretty short list of basic thoughts.

Great, so now we just need to cause the spelling to have no relation to the sound and get everyone to agree on which concepts go into other concepts. Good luck naming the political parties.

no, no, no, the spelling would still relate to the sounds, words would remain pronounceable because the grammar by which one combined ideas into words would be built so that grammatical and pronounceable were always the same.

the political parties would name themselves, just like they do today, with names that are faltering to themselves and imply that their opponents are against something good

So, we can now only make words that are composed of meaning units that fit together in a way that works sound-wise? Or do we only give consonants meanings and toss in extra vowels? This does not work with English. You would need to invent a new language. And if it didn't have, at least, thousands of letters then it either wouldn't do this or it would have a very limited vocabulary.

looking back at this debate it seems to be of the basic form:

digory: it would be fun if people could jump off tall buildings and not fall to the ground

Rachel: no, you're wrong, if you jumped off a tall building you would fall to the ground, and falling to the ground is not fun.