A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an
ideogram used to mark
semantic
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
categories of words in
logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. They have no direct counterpart in spoken language, though they may derive historically from glyphs for real words, and functionally they resemble
classifiers in East Asian and sign languages.
For example, Egyptian hieroglyphic determinatives include symbols for divinities, people, parts of the body, animals, plants, and books/abstract ideas, which helped in reading but were not pronounced.
Cuneiform
In
cuneiform
Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...
texts of
Sumerian,
Akkadian and
Hittite languages, many
noun
In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...
s are preceded or followed by a
Sumerian word acting as a determinative; this specifies that the associated word belongs to a particular semantic group.
[Edzard, 2003] These determinatives were not pronounced. In
transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
s of Sumerian, the determinatives are written in superscript in upper case. Whether a given sign is a mere determinative (not pronounced) or a
Sumerogram (a logographic spelling of a word intended to be pronounced) cannot always be determined unambiguously since their use is not always consistent.
Examples of determinatives (with transliteration superscripts in parentheses):
[Hayes, John L., "A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts", Undena Publications, 2000]
* ( or ) for male personal names
* () for female personal name
* () for trees and all things made of wood
* () for countries
* () for cities (but also often succeeding )
* () for people and professions
* () for ethnicities or multiple people
* ( or ) for gods and other divinities
* () for buildings and temples
* (
) for stars and constellations
* (
) (a ligature of (''watercourse'') and (''deep waters''), transliterated: ) before canals or rivers in administrative texts
* () for birds.
Egyptian
In
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...
ian
hieroglyphs, determinatives came at the end of a word. Nearly every word – nouns,
verb
A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...
s, and
adjective
An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...
s – features a determinative, some of which become very specific: "
Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt ( ', shortened to , , locally: ) is the southern portion of Egypt and is composed of the Nile River valley south of the delta and the 30th parallel North. It thus consists of the entire Nile River valley from Cairo south to Lake N ...
ian
barley
Barley (), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains; it was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BC, giving it nonshattering spikele ...
" or "
excreted things". It is believed that they were used as much as
word dividers as for
semantic disambiguation. Examples include 𓀀 (man), 𓁐 (woman) and 𓀭 (god/king).
Determinatives are generally not transcribed, but when they are, they are transcribed by their number in
Gardiner's Sign List.
Chinese
Some 90% of
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...
are
determinative-phonetic compounds; the phonetic element and the determinative (called a
radical) are combined to form a single glyph. Both the meaning and pronunciation of the characters have shifted over the millennia, to the point that the determinatives and phonetic elements are not always reliable guides; nevertheless, radicals are still important for indexing of characters such as in a dictionary.
Notes
References
External links
*
{{Egyptian hieroglyphs navbox
Sumerian words and phrases
Hieroglyphs
*