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A 'determinative' is an ideogram used to mark classes of words in pictographic languages; example categorized classes include "dead people", "lifting", "things made of wood", and "swords". Determinatives are often, but not always, words of their own. Determinatives never played a role in spoken language, where different vowel sounds would have distinguished words that have the same set of consonants.

Contents

Cuneiform

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Chinese

Cuneiform

In Mesopotamian cuneiform texts (mainly of the languages Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite), nouns are preceded by a Sumerian word acting as a determinative. In transliterations, the determinatives are commonly superscript and written in capitals.

★ GIŠ for trees and all things made of wood

★ KUR for countries

★ URU for cities (but also often succeeding KI)

★ LÚ for people and professions

★ LÚ.MEŠ for ethnicities or multiple people

★ LUGAL for kings

★ DINGIR for gods

★ É for buildings and temples

Egyptian hieroglyphs

In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, determinatives came at the end of a word and before any suffixes. Nearly every word — nouns, verbs, and adjectives — features a determinative, some of which become rather specific: "Upper Egyptian barley" or "excreted things".
Determinatives are generally not transcribed, but when they are, they are transcribed by their number in Gardiner's Sign List.

★ Determinative Signs In Egyptian

Chinese

A majority of Chinese characters are determinative-phonetic compounds where both phonetic and determinative are considered integral parts of the character and are written both squeezed into the square space allotted for a character.
The radical of a determinative-phonetic compound character is usually the determinative portion, although there are exceptions when the determinative does not happen to be one of the short list of radical elements, and some other subset of the strokes of the character must be selected as the dictionary header under which to file the character.