Determinative

In cuneiform texts of Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite languages, many nouns are preceded or followed by a Sumerian word acting as a determinative; this specifies that the associated word belongs to a particular semantic group. These determinatives were not pronounced. In transliterations 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): • ( 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 • (𒀯|) for stars and constellations • () (a ligature of (watercourse) and (deep waters), 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 very specific: "Upper Egyptian barley" 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 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==