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This is being pedantic.

You cannot guess the pronunciation of a character from the way it is written. At most the "phonosemantic compound" might provide a clue to possibly reduce the space of possibilities.





It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.

And so we are back to square one: it is not possible to know how to pronounce a character by looking at it (and any clues are not "decent" in the majority of cases), as opposed to alphabetic systems...



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