Linguistics

For French it's how ultimitchow said. For Italian (I saw it being used in Italian) it's probably similar, something like muoio/morto/morire dal ridere (I die/dead/to die of-the laughing).

Regarding Chinese varieties, it's less that the language is "pictorial" and more that the writing system contains both semantic and phonetic components, and often the same character can be read multiple ways. That ⟨哈⟩ for example seems to mean originally "a mouthful" or similar, but it's being used for /ha˥/ instead for obvious reasons.