Usually you’d rely on educated guesswork like this - and in many cases the character isn’t pronounced exactly the same because of drift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Sound_change), but Chinese isn’t as precise as many people make it out to be: “When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its “side” 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of “folk reading” have become acceptable over time – listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 ting in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁 ding”.
Apologies, but do we agree that this is much less reliable and clear than what relevant languages (some more than others - Russian, for example, is much less ambiguous in this regard) have?
I was just looking at this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yǒu_biān_dú_biān
Usually you’d rely on educated guesswork like this - and in many cases the character isn’t pronounced exactly the same because of drift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Sound_change), but Chinese isn’t as precise as many people make it out to be: “When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its “side” 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of “folk reading” have become acceptable over time – listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 ting in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁 ding”.
Apologies, but do we agree that this is much less reliable and clear than what relevant languages (some more than others - Russian, for example, is much less ambiguous in this regard) have?
yes