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The below table indicates possible combinations of initials and finals in Standard Chinese, but does not indicate tones, which are equally important to the proper pronunciation of Chinese. Although some initial-final combinations have some syllables using each of the five different tones, most do not.
Korean, Vietnamese, some Chinese dialects and minority languages (such as Zhuang and Yao) that use Chinese characters also have similar pronunciation methods for Chinese characters. In Korea, kun'yomi is called "interpretation reading" (釋讀). These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as "i.e." is read as "that is".
Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
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.
In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials ( semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).
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 ...
Furthermore, many varieties of Chinese deleted Middle Chinese final consonants, but these contrasts may have been preserved, helping lead to tonogenesis of contemporary multitonal systems.) Traditional Chinese dialectology reckons syllables ending in a stop consonant as possessing a fourth tone, known technically as a checked tone.
The Institute of Language in Education Scheme (Chinese: 教院式拼音方案) also known as the List of Cantonese Pronunciation of Commonly-used Chinese Characters romanization scheme (常用字廣州話讀音表), ILE scheme, and Cantonese Pinyin, [1] is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by Ping-Chiu Thomas Yu (Chinese: 余秉昭) in 1971, [2] [3] and subsequently modified by the ...