Chinese characters
Phono-semantic compounds

Phono-semantic compounds (形声; 形聲; xíngshēng) are composed of at least one semantic component and one phonetic component. They may be formed by one of several methods, often by adding a phonetic component to disambiguate a loangraph, or by adding a semantic component to represent a specific extension of a character's meaning. Examples of phono-semantic compounds include 河 (hé; ' river '), 湖 (hú; ' lake '), 流 (liú; ' stream '), 沖 (chōng; ' surge '), and 滑 (huá; ' slippery '). Each of these characters have three short strokes on their left-hand side: 氵, a simplified combining form of ⽔ 'WATER'. This component serves a semantic function in each example, indicating the character has some meaning related to water. The remainder of each character is its phonetic component: 湖 (hú) is pronounced identically to 胡 (hú) in Standard Chinese, 河 (hé) is pronounced similarly to 可 (kě), and 沖 (chōng) is pronounced similarly to 中 (zhōng).

The phonetic components of most compounds may only provide an approximate pronunciation, even before subsequent sound shifts in the spoken language. Some characters may only have the same initial or final sound of a syllable in common with phonetic components. A phonetic series comprises all the characters created using the same phonetic component, which may have diverged significantly in their pronunciations over time. For example, 茶 (chá; caa4; ' tea ') and 途 (tú; tou4; ' route ') are part of the phonetic series of characters using 余 (yú; jyu4), a literary first-person pronoun. The Old Chinese pronunciations of these characters were similar, but the phonetic component no longer serves as a useful hint for their pronunciation due to subsequent sound shifts.
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