Determinative
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A determinative is an ideogram used to mark classes of words in pictographic languages; example 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.
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)
- LU for people and professions
- LU.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.
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