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Kun'yomi (訓読み) is a way of pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese. It is the pronunciation of the Japanese synonymous word that uses a Chinese character. Therefore, kun'yomi readings only borrow the form and meaning of Chinese characters, and do not use the Chinese pronunciations.
In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials ( semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).
The voiceless stops that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages.In addition, Old Chinese is commonly thought to have syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ [1] [2] (sometimes called the "long entering tone" while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone").
For instance, 覅 (fiào; ㄈㄧㄠˋ) is a borrowing from Shanghainese (and other dialects of Wu Chinese) that are commonly used, and are thus included in most large dictionaries, even though it is usually labeled as a nonstandard regionalism (方, short for 方言 ), with the local reading viau [vjɔ], which is approximated in Standard ...
Furthermore, many varieties of Chinese deleted Middle Chinese final consonants, but these contrasts may have been preserved, helping lead to tonogenesis of contemporary multitonal systems.) Traditional Chinese dialectology reckons syllables ending in a stop consonant as possessing a fourth tone, known technically as a checked tone.
The y in dhyao indicates that the initial is a stop in Min, Japanese, and Vietnamese, but otherwise an affricate. Cantonese and Korean retain the final m of remm. These pronunciations are all predictable given the General Chinese transcription, though it was not designed with the Sinospheric languages specifically in mind.
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 ...