Editing Kanji (section)

==={{translit|ja|Keisei moji}} ({{Nihongo2|形声文字}})===
{{translit|ja|Keisei}} (Mandarin: {{translit|cmn|xíngshēng}}) characters are phono-semantic or [[Radical (Chinese character)|radical]]-phonetic compounds, sometimes called "semantic-phonetic", "semasio-phonetic", or "phonetic-ideographic" characters, are by far the largest category, making up about 90% of the characters in the standard lists; however, some of the most frequently used kanji belong to one of the three groups mentioned above, so {{translit|ja|keisei moji}} will usually make up less than 90% of the characters in a text. Typically they are made up of two components, one of which (most commonly, but by no means always, the left or top element) suggests the general category of the meaning or semantic context, and the other (most commonly the right or bottom element) approximates the pronunciation. The pronunciation relates to the original Chinese, and may now only be distantly detectable in the modern Japanese {{translit|ja|on'yomi}} of the kanji; it generally has no relation at all to {{translit|ja|kun'yomi}}. The same is true of the semantic context, which may have changed over the centuries or in the transition from Chinese to Japanese. As a result, it is a common error in folk etymology to fail to recognize a phono-semantic compound, typically instead inventing a compound-indicative explanation.