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This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Mandarin on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and was popularized by continued development of that course at Yale. [2] [3] The system approximated Chinese sounds using English spelling conventions, in order to accelerate acquisition of correct pronunciation by English speakers. [4]
A Chinese vowel diagram or Chinese vowel chart is a schematic arrangement of the vowels of the Chinese language, which usually refers to Standard Chinese.The earliest known Chinese vowel diagrams were made public in 1920 by Chinese linguist Yi Tso-lin with the publication of his Lectures on Chinese Phonetics, three years after Daniel Jones published the famous "cardinal vowel diagram" in 1917.
However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to affect a standard accent. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable ...
Normally, the sound of one Chinese character is one syllable. Mandarin Chinese totally has about 1,300 different syllables with tones (only over 400 syllables if the tones are not taken into account). And modern Chinese has more than 10,000 characters, with an average of over 7.5 characters per syllable. That means homophonic characters widely ...
This comparison of Standard Chinese transcription systems comprises a list of all syllables which are considered phonemically distinguishable within Standard Chinese. Gwoyeu Romatzyh employs a different spelling for each tone , whereas other systems employ tone marks or superscript numerals.
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In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...