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Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
When a group uses a translated name, the Chinese characters should always be included, because there is not always a 1:1 correspondence of terms between Chinese and English. For example, the People's Republic of China uses the term 主席 (zhǔxí) to mean "president", but there are other Chinese words usually translated as "president", such as ...
Transliteration of Chinese. 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.
Standard Chinese can be analyzed as having between two and six vowel phonemes. [ 9 ]/i, u, y/ (which may also be analyzed as underlying glides) are high (close) vowels, /ə/ is mid whereas /a/ is low (open). The precise realization of each vowel depends on its phonetic environment.
Romanization of Chinese (Chinese : 中文拉丁化; pinyin : zhōngwén lādīnghuà) 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.
t. e. 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. Hanyu (汉语; 漢語) literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official system used ...
Standard Chinese (simplified Chinese: 现代标准汉语; traditional Chinese: 現代標準漢語; pinyin: Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ; lit. 'modern standard Han speech') is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912‒1949).
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.