A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an
ideogram used to mark
semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
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 none of which were pronounced.
Cuneiform
In
cuneiform texts of
Sumerian
Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to:
*Sumer, an ancient civilization
**Sumerian language
**Sumerian art
**Sumerian architecture
**Sumerian literature
**Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing
*Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...
,
Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to:
* Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire
* Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language
* Akkadian literature, literature in this language
* Akkadian cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo- syllabi ...
and
Hittite languages, many
nouns are preceded or followed by a
Sumerian
Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to:
*Sumer, an ancient civilization
**Sumerian language
**Sumerian art
**Sumerian architecture
**Sumerian literature
**Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing
*Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...
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
transliterations of Sumerian, the determinatives are written in superscript in lower 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 are:
[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 and , transliterated: ) before canals or rivers in administrative texts
* () for birds.
Egyptian
In
Ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs, determinatives came at the end of a word. Nearly every word – nouns,
verbs, and
adjectives – features a determinative, some of which become rather specific: "
Upper Egyptian
barley" or "
excreted
Excretion is a process in which metabolic waste
is eliminated from an organism. In vertebrates this is primarily carried out by the lungs, kidneys, and skin. This is in contrast with secretion, where the substance may have specific tasks after lea ...
things". It is believed that they were used as much as
word dividers as for
semantic disambiguation
Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...
. 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 are
determinative-phonetic compounds; the phonetic element and the determinative (called a
radical
Radical may refer to:
Politics and ideology Politics
*Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change
*Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...
) 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
*