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The character 鳁 (traditional form 鰮) is a phono-semantic compound that specifically names sardines or pilchards, small, oily schooling fish found in marine environments. It combines the simplified semantic radical 鱼, marking the word as a type of fish, with the phonetic component 昷, which indicates its pronunciation. As a precise noun for these economically important forage fish, 鳁 illustrates how a semantic category and a phonetic marker merge to label a particular marine species.
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