5 ms·
It's actually the opposite: Chinese script is quite phonetic (with a lot of different base characters though) with some semantic hints. This is this way and not
by tokinonagare 3y ago
It's actually the opposite: Chinese script is quite phonetic (with a lot of different base characters though) with some semantic hints. This is this way and not the other way around because of the historical formation of the main category of characters (形聲) in which new parts were added to do semantic disambiguation between graphemes used to write (quasi-)homonyms.
- throwaway290 3y agoMy impression was that 90% kanji are significantly phonetic but the remaining ideographic 10% are actually some of the most frequently used (上/下 and others)? Which is what I referred to as "a good chunk of it". But I don't know what I'm talking about:)