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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 ...
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.
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.
Another result of English influence on Chinese is the appearance of so-called 字母词; 字母詞 (zìmǔcí; 'lettered words') spelled with letters from the English alphabet. These have appeared in colloquial usage, as well as in magazines and newspapers, and on websites and television:
Shifu" is in fact the English spelling of two similar but distinct Chinese words (师傅; shīfù and 师父; shīfu). The only phonetic difference between the two words is the tone of the second syllable. Because English is not a tonal language, in English texts the two words are usually written the same way.
Taiwanese politician Mei Feng had criticised the official English name of the state, "Republic of China", for failing to translate the Chinese character "Min" (Chinese: 民; English: people) according to Sun Yat-sen's original interpretations, while the name should instead be translated as "the People's Republic of China", which confuses with ...
For roadways, highways, expressways and railways whose names in Chinese consist of two- or three-character abbreviations (usually of terminal cities), do not simply adopt the pinyin version of the Chinese abbreviation as the English article name. Instead, spell out the full English name of each location mentioned in the Chinese abbreviation and ...
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 ...