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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 ...
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.
Atakapa (/ ə ˈ t æ k ə p ə,-p ɑː /, [1] [2] natively Ishakkoy [3]) is an extinct language isolate native to southwestern Louisiana and nearby coastal eastern Texas.It was spoken by the Atakapa people (also known as Ishak, after their word for "the people").
The Chinese–English Dictionary [9] locates the head character entry lín 林 "① forest; woods; grove ② circles …" as one of 14 characters pronounced lín, and alphabetically lists 17 words with lín as the first syllable, for instance, línchǎnpǐn 林产品 "forest products", línhǎi 林海 "immense forest", and línyè 林業 "forestry
The Atakapa language was a language isolate, once spoken along the Louisiana and East Texas coast and believed extinct since the mid-20th century. [9] John R. Swanton in 1919 proposed a Tunican language family that would include Atakapa, Tunica, and Chitimacha.
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 page from the Yiqiejing yinyi, the oldest extant Chinese dictionary of Buddhist technical terminology – Dunhuang manuscripts, c. 8th century. There are two types of dictionaries regularly used in the Chinese language: 'character dictionaries' (字典; zìdiǎn) list individual Chinese characters, and 'word dictionaries' (辞典; 辭典; cídiǎn) list words and phrases.
Loanwords have entered written and spoken Chinese from many sources, including ancient peoples whose descendants now speak Chinese. In addition to phonetic differences, varieties of Chinese such as Cantonese and Shanghainese often have distinct words and phrases left from their original languages which they continue to use in daily life and sometimes even in Mandarin.