Laurent Sagart
Due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 'each', pronounced "měi" in Standard Mandarin, are the characters 'to humiliate', 'to regret', and 'sea', pronounced respectively "wǔ", "huǐ", and "hǎi" in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese –  (每), } (悔), and } (海) according to a recent reconstruction by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations.