Whereas ue 7 written as a semantic loan character 會 (cf. 能 neng 2 'can' or 會 hui 4 'can/may' M). can be traced back to 解 xie 4 'know, understand' with confidence, the etymological origin of 通 thang 1 (cf. 可以 ke 3 yi 3 'can/be allowed to' M). remains still unsettled.
Despite its partially revisionary character, semantic anti-realism does not rule out a substantive metaphysics of (anti-realist) meaning/content, however.
Another reason that the direct connection between orthography and semantics is critical is that 80% of Chinese characters contain semantic radicals that are parts of characters that provide a clue to meaning (e.g., category).
/ xíngshēng: Phonetic complexes, in which one part often called the radical indicates the general semantic category of the character (such as water-related or eye-related), and the other part is another character, used for its phonetic value.
Classical Chinese has not only fewer multi-character words, but on the whole the semantic range of single-character words in classical Chinese is wider than in modern Chinese, allowing for more possible combinations with adjacent characters.
The second aspect of meaning, character, reflects semantic rules governing how the content of an expression may vary from one context of use to the next.
In this theory, a circular definition imparts to the defined term a meaning that is hypothetical in character; the semantic value of the defined term is a rule of revision, not as with non-circular definitions, a rule of application.
Descartes was completely puzzled by just this rational character and semantic coherence of thought processes so much so that he failed to even imagine a possible mechanistic explication of it.
The problem is intensified by the fact that neither the sound property nor the semantic property of the characters is of much help in the recognition of a character.
Diverging from previous works, the current study employed a non-factorial design and focused on semantic processing of single characters representing a spectrum of concreteness values to ensure high ecological validity.
