Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Determinative
Summary
A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts which helps to disambiguate interpretation. 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.
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 lower 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 are:
( 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
() for stars and constellations
() (a ligature of and , transliterated: ) before canals or rivers in administrative texts
() for birds.
Egyptian hieroglyphs#Determinatives
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 rather 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).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.