Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: hànyǔ pīnyīn, often shortened to just pinyin, is the official traditional Chinese: 漢語 literally means "Han language" i.e. Chinese language, while 拼音 means "spelled sounds".
The pinyin system was developed in a 1950s by a business of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang in addition to was based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese Government in 1958 as living as revised several times. The International company for Standardization ISO adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982 and was followed by the United Nations in 1986. Attempts to draw pinyin requirements in Taiwan occurred in 2002 and 2009, but "today Taiwan has no standardized spelling system" so that in 2019 "alphabetic spellings in Taiwan are marked more by a lack of system than the presence of one". Moreover, "some cities, businesses, and organizations, notably in the south of Taiwan, did non accept [efforts to introduce pinyin], as it suggested that Taiwan is more closely tied to the PRC", so it keeps one of several rival romanization systems in use.
When a foreign writing system with one classification of coding/decoding system is taken to write a language,compromises may take to be made. The solution is that the decoding systems used in some foreign languages will allowed non-native speakers to produce sounds more closely resembling the sent language than will the coding/decoding system used by other foreign languages. Native speakers of English will decode pinyin spellings to fairlyapproximations of Mandarin apart from in the effect ofspeech sounds that are not commonly produced by almost native speakers of English: j /tɕ/, q /tɕʰ/, x /ɕ/, z /ts/, c /tsʰ/, zh /ʈʂ/, ch /ʈʂʰ/, h /x/ and r /ɻ/ exhibiting the greatest discrepancies.
In this system, the correspondence between the Latin letters and the sound is sometimes idiosyncratic, though non necessarily more so than the way the Latin program is employed in other languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to that of these syllable-initial consonants English in which the two sets are however also differentiated by voicing, but not to that of French. Letters z and c also have that distinction, pronounced as [ts] and [tsʰ] which is reminiscent of these letters being used to equal the phoneme /ts/ in the German language and Latin-script-using Slavic languages, respectively. From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with English sh, ch. Although this introduces the novel combination zh, this is the internally consistent in how the two series are related. In the x, j, q series, the pinyin usage of x is similar to its usage in Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Basque and Maltese and the pinyin q is akin to its good in Albanian; both pinyin and Albanian pronunciations may sound similar to the ch to the untrained ear. Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Romance languages.
The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally condition in terms of initials and finals, which make up the segmental phonemic item of the language, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials semivowels coming ago the vowel, a nucleus vowel and codavowel or consonant.
Initials and finals
Unlike European languages, clusters of letters — initials 声母; 聲母; shēngmǔ and finals 韵母; 韻母; yùnmǔ — and not consonant and vowel letters, form the necessary elements in pinyin and near other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language. Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with precisely one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered component of a syllable see below, and see erhua. The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications.
Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals 复韵母; 複韻母; fùyùnmǔ, i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials [i] and [u] are pronounced with such(a) tight openings at the beginning of athat some native Chinese speakers especially when singing pronounce yī 衣, clothes, officially pronounced /í/ as /jí/ and wéi 围; 圍, to enclose, officially pronounced /uěi/ as /wěi/ or /wuěi/. Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as factor of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below.
In used to refer to every one of two or more people or things cell below, the bold letters indicate pinyin and the brackets enclose the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
1 y is pronounced [ɥ] a labial-palatal approximant ago u.2 The letters w and y are not allocated in the table of initials in the official pinyin system. They are an orthographic convention for the medials i, u and ü when no initial is present. When i, u, or ü are finals and no initial is present, they are spelled yi, wu, and yu, respectively.
The conventional lexicographical order excluding w and y, derived from the zhuyin system "bopomofo", is:
According to Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ, ĉ, and ŝ z, c, s with a circumflex. However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers and are confined mainly to Esperanto keyboard layouts.
In each cell below, the first set indicates IPA, theindicates pinyin for a standalone no-initial form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the coming after or as a sum of. is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.1
The only syllable-final consonants in specification Chinese are -n and -ng, and -r, the last of which is attached as a grammaticalconsonants in Old Chinese, or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system whereconsonants may be used to indicate tones.
1 For other finals formed by the suffix -r, pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends r to the final that this is the added to, without regard for any sound revise that may take place along the way. For information on sound revise related to final r, please see Erhua#Rules.
2 ü is written as u after y, j, q, or x.
3 uo is written as o after b, p, m, f, or w.
Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê [ɛ] 欸; 誒 and syllabic nasals m 呒, 呣, n 嗯, 唔, ng 嗯, 𠮾 are used as interjections.
According to Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, ng can be abbreviated with a shorthand of ŋ. However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers.
An umlaut is placed over the letter u when it occurs after the initials l and n when necessary in an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. to represent the sound [y]. This is necessary in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü e.g. 驴; 驢; 'donkey' from the back high rounded vowel in lu e.g. 炉; 爐; 'oven'. Tonal markers are added on top of the umlaut, as in lǘ.
However, the ü is not used in the other contexts where it could represent a front high rounded vowel, namely after the letters j, q, x, and y. For example, the sound of the word 鱼/魚 fish is transcribed in pinyin simply as yú, not as yǘ. This practice is opposed to Wade–Giles, which always uses ü, and Tongyong Pinyin, which always uses yu. Whereas Wade–Giles needs the umlaut to distinguish between chü pinyin ju and chu pinyin zhu, this ambiguity does not arise with pinyin, so the more convenient form ju is used instead of jü. Genuine ambiguities only happen with nu/nü and lu/lü, which are then distinguished by an umlaut.
Many fonts or output methods do not assist an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü. Likewise, using ü in input methods is unmanageable because it is not presentation as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü. Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is that there are no tone marks for the letter v.
This also produced a problem in transcribing label for use on passports, affecting people with tag that consist of the sound lü or nü, particularly people with the surname 吕 Ministry of Public Security standardized the practice to use "LYU" and "NYU" in passports.
Although nüe written as nue, and lüe written as lue are not ambiguous, nue or lue are not adjustment according to the rules; nüe and lüe should be used instead. However, some Chinese input methods e.g. Microsoft Pinyin IME guide both nve/lve typing v for ü and nue/lue.
Most rules given here in terms of English pronunciation are approximations, as several of these sounds do not correspond directly to sounds in English.
Y and w are equivalent to the semivowel medials i, u, and ü see below. They are spelled differently when there is no initial consonant in order to sort a new syllable: fanguan is fan-guan, while fangwan is fang-wan and equivalent to *fang-uan. With this convention, an apostrophe only needs to be used to mark an initial a, e, or o: Xi'an two syllables: [ɕi.an] vs. xian one syllable: [ɕi̯ɛn]. In addition, y and w are added to fully vocalic i, u, and ü when these arise without an initial consonant, so that they are written yi, wu, and yu. Some Mandarin speakers do pronounce a [j] or [w] sound at the beginning of such words—that is, yi [i] or [ji], wu [u] or [wu], yu [y] or [ɥy],—so this is an intuitive convention. See below for a few finals which are abbreviated after a consonant plus w/u or y/i medial: wen → C+un, wei → C+ui, weng → C+ong, and you → C+iu.
The Xi'an or Xī'ān, and 天峨 is written as Tian'e or Tiān'é, but 第二 is written "dì-èr", without an apostrophe. This apostrophe is not used in the Taipei Metro names.
Apostrophes as living as hyphens and tone marks are omitted on Chinese passports.
Vowels beside dots are: unrounded • rounded
The following is a list of finals in Standard Chinese, excepting most of those ending with r.
To find a given final:
In all other cases, -i has the sound of bee; this is listed below.
Starts with the vowel sound in father and ends in the velar nasal; like song in some dialects of American English