Talk:Phonetic complement

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This page appears to define phonetic complements as determinatives. Must rework. -Ben 17:47, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Not as determinatives, but it's not clear, and not confined to Cuneiform. At least Japanese and Mayan also do this. kwami (talk) 09:03, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I hope my English example in the article makes the meaning clear. Greensburger (talk) 04:46, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

That helped. I expanded it a bit. kwami (talk) 12:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Okurigana vs. complement trivia

Removing some incorrect trivia (found in 680549567). Thanks to Criminy1!

Occasionally okurigana coincide with a component of the preceding compound Chinese characters, though this is generally a coincidence, and does not mean that same character is functioning as a phonetic both in the Chinese character and in the following okurigana. Notably, 割り wa-ri, as in the word 割り算 (wa-ri-zan, division), the right side of 割 is 刂, and both the hiragana り and katakana リ ri derive from 利 (the katakana リ from the right side 刂), so one might think that 刂 is the phonetic complement of both 割 and 利, but in fact it functions as a semantic in both. Fundamentally, in Japanese use of Chinese characters, phonetic complements in the Chinese character correspond to the Sino-Japanese (on, originally Chinese) reading, while okurigana come from part of the native Japanese reading, and any time these are the same is simply a coincidence.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 01:49, 23 January 2017 (UTC)