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Tue Mar 15 17:42:23 UTC 2011 

By far the most numerous category are the phono-semantic compounds, also
called semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds. These
characters are composed of two parts: one of a limited set of
pictographs, often graphically simplified, which suggests the general
meaning of the character, and an existing character pronounced
approximately as the new target word.

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, which is a simplified
pictograph for a river, 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
/druŋ/[46]), the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese
/truŋ/[47]), 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; this process means that the composition of
such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today. Further, the choice
of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the
radical of 貓 māo "cat" is 豸 zhì, originally a pictograph for
worms,[citation needed] but in characters of this sort indicating an
animal of any kind.

Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) placed approximately 82% of characters into this
category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary (1716 CE) the number is closer
to 90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend
the Chinese vocabulary.

This method is still sometimes used to form new characters, for example
钚 bù "plutonium") is the metal radical 金 jīn plus the phonetic
component 不 bù, described in Chinese as "不 gives sound, 金 gives
meaning". Many Chinese names of elements in the periodic table and many
other chemistry-related characters were formed this way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script#Phono-semantic_compounds

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