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A picture that fixes the meaning.
Also known as: Hieroglyphic classifier, Egyptian semantic sign
The Egyptian hieroglyph placed at the end of a word to show what class of thing it names.
Marks the preceding word as belonging to a class — motion, speech, abstraction, a person, a foreign land.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
Unpronounced like the cuneiform determinative and reached independently, which suggests the device is what any script with ambiguous phonetic signs eventually invents.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
The walking-legs sign after a word of motion and the scroll after an abstraction are the two a reader meets first, and they make a text's grammar visible before any of it is read.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
A pictorial sign — a seated figure, a pair of walking legs, a scroll — set after the phonetic signs of a word and not pronounced.
Both mark a word's semantic class with a sign that is written and not pronounced.