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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.
Lin's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage comprises approximately 8,100 character head entries and 110,000 word and phrase entries. [10] It includes both modern Chinese neologisms such as xǐnǎo 洗腦 "brainwash" and many Chinese loanwords from English such as yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll" and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".
Words of Chinese origin have entered European languages, including English. Most of these were direct loanwords from various varieties of Chinese.However, Chinese words have also entered indirectly via other languages, particularly Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, that have all used Chinese characters at some point and contain a large number of Chinese loanwords.
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 ...
Articles for railway stations in China should be named using the city's name (or in some cases the station's unique name, for example 沙坪坝站) followed by the English translation of the cardinal direction in the railway station name, if applicable (North, South etc.), and then [railway station]:
Translating a non-Chinese toponym into a Chinese exonym is a complex task, given the high number of homophones in Chinese, the existence of multiple conventions for translation, and differences in the phonetic systems between the source language and Chinese. [1] Generally, Chinese exonyms fall into three categories:
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.
Sir Henry Pottinger, the 1st Governor of Hong Kong. It was not uncommon for British officials to be given translation of their names in history. Before getting a new translation, the name of the very first Hong Kong colonial governor, Henry Pottinger, was originally translated as 煲 顛 茶 or Bōu Dīn Chàh in Cantonese [7] which phonetically rhymes with his family name Pottinger fairly ...