![A variety of ad hoc romanisation schemes are used by non-Mandarin speakers in Southeast Asia. The name of this Melaka drugstore,
Ren He Tang ; Renhetang, is transcribed as Yin Foh Tong, quite likely reflecting the Hakka pronunciation [jin fo toNG] Melaka-Yin-Foh-Tong-Pharmacy-2389.jpg](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Melaka-Yin-Foh-Tong-Pharmacy-2389.jpg/220px-Melaka-Yin-Foh-Tong-Pharmacy-2389.jpg)
The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems.
The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems.
General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for inter-dialectal communication in written Chinese.
General Chinese is not wholly a romanisation system, but consists of two alternative systems: one uses Chinese characters as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other is a romanisation system with similar spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh .
官話字母; Guānhuà zìmǔ, developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese katakana , which he learned during a two-year stay in Japan, and consisted of letters that were based on components of Chinese characters. After returning to China in 1900, he taught his system in various parts of North China, but the government banned it in 1901. [1]
One of Wang's contemporaries, Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921), later adapted Guanhua zimu for use in two Wu dialects, those of Ningbo and Suzhou. In doing this, he raised the issue that was ultimately responsible for the failure of all alphabetic writing systems in China: the notion that people should be introduced to literacy in their own local dialects. Such a proposal would both challenge the unique position of the millennia-old writing system and create more than one literary language, destroying China's linguistic unity in both the historical and geographic senses. Because of this, there was strong opposition from the very beginning to proposals of this kind. [2]
Wu Jingheng, who had developed a "beansprout alphabet", and Wang Zhao, who had developed Guanhua zimu in 1900, [3] and Lu Zhuangzhang were part of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (1912–1913), which developed the rudimentary Jiyin Zimu (記音字母) system of Zhang Binglin into the Mandarin-specific phonetic system now known as Zhuyin Fuhao or bopomofo, proclaimed on 23 November 1918.
The significant feature of bopomofo is that it is composed entirely of ruby characters which can be written beside any Chinese text whether written vertically, right-to-left, or left-to-right. [4] The characters within the bopomofo system are unique phonetic characters, and are not part of the Latin alphabet. In this way, it is not technically a form of romanisation, but because it is used for phonetic transcription the alphabet is often grouped with the romanisation systems.
When Taiwan was under Japanese rule, a katakana-based writing system used to write Holo Taiwanese. It functioned as a phonetic guide to Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese, or bopomofo. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages.
Tao prununciation letters, or Tao HanZi Yin in chinese, are pronunciation letters invented in 1939 for a Cantonese language dictionary. [5]
The Phags-pa script was an alphabet designed by Drogön Chögyal Phagpa at the behest of Kublai Khan during the Yuan dynasty, to unify the empire's various languages. While Phags-pa has aided in the reconstruction of pre-modern Chinese pronunciation, it totally ignores tone.
The Manchu alphabet was used to write Chinese in the Qing dynasty.
In Inner Mongolia the Mongolian alphabet is used to transliterate Chinese.
Xiao'erjing uses the Arabic alphabet to transliterate Chinese. It is used on occasion by many ethnic minorities who adhere to the Islamic faith in China (mostly the Hui, but also the Dongxiang, and the Salar), and formerly by their Dungan descendants in Central Asia. Soviet writing reforms forced the Dungan to replace xiao'erjing with a Roman alphabet and later a Cyrillic alphabet, which they continue to use up until today.
There have been many Chinese romanisation systems throughout history. Recently, Hanyu Pinyin has become prominent since its introduction in 1982. Other well-known systems include Wade-Giles and Yale.
The Russian system for Cyrillisation of Chinese is the Palladius system. The Dungan language, a variety of Mandarin, was once written in the Latin script, but now employs Cyrillic. Some use the Cyrillic alphabet to shorten pinyin—e.g. 是; shì as ш.
Various other countries employ bespoke systems for cyrillising Chinese.
A number of braille transcriptions have been developed for Chinese. In mainland China, traditional mainland Chinese Braille and Two-Cell Chinese Braille are used in parallel to transcribe Standard Chinese. Taiwanese Braille is used in Taiwan for Taiwanese Mandarin. [6]
In traditional Mainland Chinese Braille, consonants and basic finals conform to international braille, but additional finals form a semi-syllabary, as in bopomofo. Each syllable is written with up to three Braille cells, representing the initial, final and tone, respectively. In practice tone is generally omitted.
In Two-Cell Chinese Braille, designed in the 1970s, each syllable is rendered with two braille characters. The first combines the initial and medial; the second the syllable rime and tone. The base letters represent the initial and rhyme; these are modified with diacritics for the medial and tone.
Like traditional Mainland Chinese Braille, Taiwanese Braille is a semi-syllabary. Although based marginally on international braille, the majority of consonants have been reassigned. [7]
Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. It is the official system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system makes use of diacritics to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts, or when writing non-Chinese words in Chinese-language texts. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries. Hànyǔ literally means 'Han language'—meaning, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'.
Wade–Giles is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892.
Ruby characters or rubi characters are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, and Korean hanja, to show the logographs' pronunciation; these were formerly also used for Vietnamese chữ Hán and chữ Nôm, and may still occasionally be seen in that context when reading archaic texts. Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are most commonly used as pronunciation guides for characters that are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader.
The Thai script is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai alphabet itself has 44 consonant symbols and 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms and four tone diacritics to create characters mostly representing syllables.
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000. This has led in part to the adoption of complementary transliteration systems as a means of representing the pronunciation of Chinese.
Dungan is a Sinitic language spoken primarily in Kazakhstan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan by the Dungan people, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China. Although it is derived from the Central Plains Mandarin of Gansu and Shaanxi, it is written in Cyrillic and contains loanwords and archaisms not found in other modern varieties of Mandarin.
The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK).
Xiao'erjing, often shortened to Xiaojing, is a Perso-Arabic script used to write Sinitic languages, including Lanyin Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, and Dungan. It is used on occasion by many ethnic minorities who adhere to Islam in China—mostly the Hui, but also the Dongxiang and the Salar—and formerly by their Dungan descendants in Central Asia. Orthographic reforms introduced the Latin script and later the Cyrillic script to the Dungan language, which continue to be used today.
This Zhuyin table is a complete listing of all Zhuyin (Bopomofo) syllables used in the Republic of China (Taiwan) as auxiliary to Chinese language studies while in Mainland China an adaptation of the Latin alphabet is used to represent Chinese phonemes in the Pinyin system. Each syllable in a cell is composed of an initial (columns) and a final (rows). An empty cell indicates that the corresponding syllable does not exist in Standard Chinese.
Mainland Chinese Braille is a braille script for Standard Chinese used in China. Consonants and basic finals conform to international braille, but additional finals form a semi-syllabary, as in bopomofo. Each syllable is written with up to three Braille cells, representing the initial, final, and tone, respectively. In practice tone is generally omitted as it is in pinyin.
Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history. Linguist Daniel Kane wrote, "It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys." The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles and Yale romanization.
Bopomofo, also called zhuyin or occasionally zhuyin fuhao, is a transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is commonly used in Taiwan. It consists of 37 characters and five tone marks, which together can transcribe all possible sounds in Mandarin Chinese.
A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosive consonants of the Phoenician alphabet into syllabograms.
A writing system comprises a particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. Writing systems can generally be classified according to how symbols function according to these rules, with the most common types being alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes. Abjads generally only have letters for consonants, while pure alphabets have letters for both consonants and vowels. Abugidas use characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras. Logographies use characters that represent semantic units, such as words or morphemes.
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu.
Lu Zhuangzhang was the first Chinese scholar to develop a system for the romanization of Chinese, the Qieyin Xinzi in 1892, which stimulated Chinese interest in script reform from inefficient Chinese characters to basic alphabetic spelling. Lu was an influential and prolific Chinese language reformer in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and early Republic of China (1912–49).
Chinese character sounds are the pronunciations of Chinese characters. The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of Beijing dialect.