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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.
Chinese character sounds (simplified Chinese: 汉字字音; traditional Chinese: 漢字字音; pinyin: hànzì zìyīn) are the pronunciations of Chinese characters. The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of the Beijing dialect. [1] Normally a Chinese character is read with one syllable.
The meaning added through the loan of homonymous sounds is the phonetic-loan meaning (simplified Chinese: 假借义; traditional Chinese: 假借義; pinyin: jiǎ jiè yì). For example, the original meaning of "其 (qí)" is "dustpan", and its pronoun usage of "his, her, its" is a phonetic-loan meaning.
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 ...
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 ...
A recent study on Chinese writing and literacy concluded, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks." [ 29 ] As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese , it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary Chinese , the standard ...
Users would input a character by pressing two keys based upon the 33 basic stroke formations, which Lin called "letters of the Chinese Alphabet". [4] Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage was the first major Chinese‐English dictionary to be produced by a fully bilingual Chinese instead of by Western missionaries. [3]
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 .