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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 ...
Breaking a mirror is said to bring seven years of bad luck [1]; A bird or flock of birds going from left to right () [citation needed]Certain numbers: The number 4.Fear of the number 4 is known as tetraphobia; in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, the number sounds like the word for "death".
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 .
Unicode reference glyphs for "bopomofo" (PDF). (69.6 KB) and "extended bopomofo" (PDF). (61.6 KB) Bopomofo annotations – adds inline and pop-up annotations with bopomofo pronunciation and English definitions to Chinese text or web pages. Mandarin Dictionary – needs Chinese font for Big5 encoding
For example, in the Yaoling dialect the colloquial reading of 物 'things' is [væʔ], [11] which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279). [12] Meanwhile, its literary reading, [voʔ], is relatively similar to the standard Mandarin pronunciation [u]. The table below shows some Chinese characters ...
The significant feature of bopomofo is that it is composed entirely of ruby characters which can be written beside any Chinese text whether written vertically, right-to-left, or left-to-right. [4] The characters within the bopomofo system are unique phonetic characters, and are not part of the Latin alphabet .
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.. Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language.
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.