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Information about Determinative

A determinative is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts. 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 written in the Akkadian and Hittite languages, most nouns are preceded by a Sumerian word acting as a determinative. The word clarified the concept of the noun but was not itself pronounced. In transliterations, the determinatives are commonly written in superscript capitals. Some examples are:
  • GIŠ for trees and all things made of wood
  • KUR for countries
  • URU for cities (but also often succeeding KI)
  • LÚ for people and professions
  • LÚ.MEŠ for ethnicities or multiple people
  • LUGAL for kings
  • DINGIR for gods
  • É for buildings and temples

Egyptian hieroglyphs

In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, determinatives came at the end of a word and before any suffixes. Nearly every word — nouns, verbs, and adjectives — features a determinative, some of which become rather specific: "Upper Egyptian barley" or "excreted things".

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.
ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idea "idea" + γράφω
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logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as syllabaries, abugidas, abjads, and alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound
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A classifier, in linguistics, is a word or morpheme used in some languages to classify a noun according to its meaning.

Classifier systems should not be confused with noun classes, which often categorize nouns in ways independent from meaning, such as according to morphology.
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Cuneiform
Child systems Old Persian, Ugaritic

Unicode range U+12000 to U+1236E (Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform)
U+12400 to U+12473 (Numbers)
ISO 15924 Xsux

Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
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Akkadian}}} 
Writing system: Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform 
Official status
Official language of: initially Akkad (central Mesopotamia); lingua franca of the Middle East and Egypt in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages.
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Hittite}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: hit
ISO 639-3: hit

Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas (modern Boğazkale) in
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Examples
A proper or common noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. As usual, a `*' in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
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Sumerian ( EME.GIR15
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Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. It is also the system of rules for that practice.

Technically, from a linguistic point of view, it is a mapping from one system of writing into another.
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capital (also called capital city or political capital — although the latter phrase has a second meaning based on an alternative sense of "capital") is the center of government.
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Kur was a monstrous dragon with scaly body and massive wings. Kur personifying the home of the dead, Hell, the "river of the dead" (see also Styx), and the void space between the primeval sea (Abzu) and the earth (Ma). Possibly an Anunnaki, brother of Ereshkigal, Enki, and Enlil.
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Uru may refer to:
  • URU, a determinative in mesopotamian cuneiform script
  • Uru, São Paulo, a city in Brazil.
  • Uru (Big Boat), an ancient trading vessel
  • Uru (Marvel Comics), a fictional metal
  • Uru (The Lion King), a fictional lioness character

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For other subjects with similar names, see .


Lugh (earlier Lug, modern Irish Lú, pronounced /luː
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Lugal ��, Sumerian for "king", from LÚ.GAL ���� "great man" was a title for the ruler of a city-state (and later of the sumerian king), usually reigning alongside a priest (ensi).
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Dingir is the Sumerian for "deity". It is written as an ideogram in the cuneiform script (Borger 2003 nr. 10 ). The sign at the same time expressed the syllable an, because it was in particular the ideogram for An, the supreme deity of the Sumerian pantheon.
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É[1] is the Sumerian for "house" or "temple", written ideographically with the cuneiform sign �� (Borger nr. 324, encoded by Unicode at codepoint U+1208D)

Specific temples:

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Egyptian hieroglyphs
Child systems Hieratic

ISO 15924 Egyp

Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Egyptian hieroglyphs (sometimes called hieroglyphics
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An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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    In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to.
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    Upper Egypt is a narrow that extends from the cataract boundaries of modern-day Aswan to the area between El-Aiyat and Zawyet Dahshur, south of modern-day Cairo. The northern section of Upper Egypt, between El-Aiyat and Asyut is sometimes known as Middle Egypt.
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    H. vulgare

    Binomial name
    Hordeum vulgare
    L.

    Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is an annual cereal grain, which serves as a major animal feed crop, with smaller amounts used for malting and in
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    Excretion is the process of eliminating waste products of metabolism and other non-useful materials.[1] It is an essential process in all forms of life.

    In single-celled organisms, waste products are discharged directly through the surface of the cell.
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    Gardiner's Sign List is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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    This page contains Chinese text.
    Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.


    A Chinese character or Han character (Simplified Chinese:
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    radical (from Latin radix, meaning "root") is the semantic root (i.e., portion bearing the meaning) of an inflected European word. Early Western sinologists borrowed this term to refer to the semantic component(s) of Chinese character (Hanzi).
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