These syllabic glyphs performed two primary functions : they were used as phonetic complements to disambiguate logograms which had more than one reading, as also occurred in Egyptian and in modern Japanese ( i . e . " furigana " ); and they were used to write grammatical elements such as verbal inflections which did not have dedicated logograms, also as in modern Japanese ( i . e . " okurigana " ).
22.
They form the majority of Chinese characters by far over 90 %, and were created by combining a rebus with a determinative that is, a character with approximately the correct pronunciation ( the phonetic element, similar to a phonetic complement ) with one of a limited number of determinative characters which supplied an element of meaning ( the semantic element, which in most cases is also the radical under which a character is listed in a dictionary ).
