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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 ...
Fanqie (Chinese: 反切; pinyin: fǎnqiè; lit. 'reverse cut') is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one with the same rest of the syllable (the final).
The main character meaning is generally the lexical meaning of the word, and the secondary character meaning is generally the grammatical meaning of the word. The meaning of the first character may be supplementary, with the meaning of the second character being primary. For example: 老師 (teacher), 容易 (easy), 阿姨 (aunt).
Here are three representative examples of praise: "the most extraordinary Chinese–English dictionary I have ever had such pleasure to look Chinese words up in and to read their English definitions"; [22] "The thorough scholarship and fresh outlook make it a valuable contribution to Chinese lexicography, while the high production standards and ...
Character sequences for words with a single meaning, often consisting of two characters, seldom three, are written without intervening hyphen or space. This also holds for compound words combining two words to one meaning: hǎifēng (simplified Chinese: 海风; traditional Chinese: 海風, sea breeze). Summary from the Library of Congress:
A number of Chinese characters are simplified-traditional multipairings (简繁一对多; 簡繁一對多), which do not have a one-to-one mapping between their simplified and traditional forms. [1] This is usually because the simplification process merged two or more distinct characters into one. [2]
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 .
Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; as of 2024 [update] , nearly 100 000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard .