Chinese characters
Examples are He  he "river", Hu  hu "lake", Liu  liu "stream", Chong  chong "riptide" (or "flush"), Hua  hua "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes (San ), which is a reduced form of the character Shui  shui meaning "water", indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water. The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of Chong  chong (Old Chinese *g-ljuNG), the phonetic indicator is Zhong  zhong (Old Chinese *k-ljuNG), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; the process of historical phonetic change means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today.
What side is a phonetic indicator located on?
right-hand side
The right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator.
a phonetic indicator