is the frequent occurrence of [jiajie], loan characters." Phono-semantic compound characters or These form over 90% of Chinese characters. They were created by combining two components: a phonetic component on the rebus principle, that is, a character with approximately the correct pronunciation. a semantic component, also called a determinative, one of a limited number of characters which supplied an element of meaning. In most cases this is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary. As in ancient Egyptian writing, such compounds eliminated the ambiguity caused by phonetic loans (above). This process can be repeated, with a phono-semantic compound character itself being used as a phonetic in a further compound, which can result in quite complex characters, such as ( = + , = + ). Often, the semantic component is on the left, but there are many possible combinations, see Shape and position of radicals. Examples As an example, a verb meaning "to wash oneself" is pronounced mù. This happens to sound the same as the word mù "tree", which was written with the simple pictograph . The verb mù could simply have been written , like "tree", but to disambiguate, it was combined with the character for "water", giving some idea of the meaning. The resulting character eventually came to be written . Similarly, the water determinative was combined with to produce the water-related homophone . However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically. It was also often the case that the determinative merely constrained the meaning of a word which already had several. is a case in point. The determinative for plants was combined with . However, does not merely provide the pronunciation. In classical texts it was also used to mean "vegetable". That is, underwent semantic extension from "harvest" to "vegetable", and the addition of merely specified that the latter meaning was to be understood. Some additional examples: Sound change Originally characters sharing the same phonetic had similar readings, though they have now diverged substantially. Linguists rely heavily on this fact to reconstruct the sounds of Old Chinese. Contemporary foreign pronunciations of characters are also used to reconstruct historical Chinese pronunciation, chiefly that of Middle Chinese. When people try to read an unfamiliar compound character, they will typically assume that it is constructed on