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The idea gained further support following the victory of the Communists in 1949, who immediately began two parallel programs regarding written Chinese. The first was the development of an alphabet to write the sounds of Mandarin, the variety spoken by around two-thirds of the Chinese population. [45]
[1] The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Beijing Mandarin) and Yale romanization (Beijing Mandarin and Cantonese). There are many uses for Chinese romanization.
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.
Simplified Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets widely used to write the Chinese language, with the other being traditional characters.Their mass standardization during the 20th century was part of an initiative by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to promote literacy, and their use in ordinary circumstances on the mainland has been encouraged by the Chinese ...
Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages.In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters.
A variety of ad hoc romanisation schemes are used by non-Mandarin speakers in Southeast Asia. The name of this Melaka drugstore, 仁和堂; Rénhétáng, is transcribed as Yin Foh Tong, quite likely reflecting the Hakka pronunciation [jin˩ fɔ˩ tɔŋ˩] The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems.
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.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Mandarin on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Mandarin in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.