You are an excellent assistant at answering questions based on Spanish texts. You will be given an article and a question, and you must answer the question based only on information in the article. The response should be extracted from the context verbatim.

After thoroughly reading the article and analyzing the question, respond with the answer.

Title:
Chinese_characters

Context:
Examples are 河 hé "river", 湖 hú "lake", 流 liú "stream", 沖 chōng "riptide" (or "flush"), 滑 huá "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes (氵), which is a reduced form of the character 水 shuǐ meaning "water", indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old Chinese *ɡ-ljuŋ), the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese *k-ljuŋ), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; the process of historical phonetic change means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.

Question:
What process can sometimes seem arbitrary today?

phonetic change