Dictionary

phono-semantic compound en · NOUN

Etymology

Calque from Chinese 形聲字／形声字 (xíngshēngzì).

Meanings

1. A Chinese character (CJKV character) composed of a component which is related to the meaning the character and another component which is related to the sound of the character.
   • 'Jeon' is a phono-semantic compound which is formed from two elements of different words in two parts. 2015, Denise Doyle, New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds, →ISBN, page 57:
   • Phono-semantic compound characters, or the combination of elements that provide meaning and sound: the rebus 干 (gan) provides the phonetic basis for combinations with determinative characters such as 木 (mu, tree),日 (ri, sun), and 月 (rou, meat), to create the characters ... 2017, Thomas O. Höllmann, Chinese Script: History, Characters, Calligraphy, →ISBN:
   • The Chinese character 城 is a phono-semantic compound of the "place" or "earth" radical 土 and 成, whose Old Chinese pronunciation has been reconstructed as *deŋ. 2016 July 31, Sigurdr Volsung, “US elections - I do remember such unpopular cadidates”, in soc.history.medieval (Usenet):
   • Only an opaque and weak orthography-to-phonology analogy rule can be found with the phono-semantic compound type of characters (i.e., the xingshēng zi), which covers 80% of modern daily-use characters. 2006, Language and linguistics - Volume 7, Issue 3, page 579:

Forms

Synonyms

semaphore-phonetic character · determination-phonetic character

Translations (6)

pl znak fonosemantyczny (a type of Chinese character) · fr idéo-phonogramme (a type of Chinese character) · cmn 形聲字 /形声字 (a type of Chinese character) · es carácter radical-fonético (a type of Chinese character) · fi kuvafoneettinen merkki (a type of Chinese character) · ja 形声文字 (a type of Chinese character)