Pinyin

Pinyin (??, p?ny?n) literally means "join (together) sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to Hàny? P?ny?n (????, literal meaning: "Han language pinyin"), which is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People's Republic of China. It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo. Similar systems have been designed for other Chinese spoken variants and non-Han minority languages in the PRC.

Orthographic features

Pinyin differs from other romanizations in several aspects, such as:

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• w is placed before syllables starting with u.
• y is placed before syllables starting with i and ü.
• ü is written as u when there is no ambiguity (such as ju, qu, and xu), but written as ü when there are corresponding u syllables (such as lü and nü)
• When preceded by a consonant, iou, uei, and uen are simplified as iu, ui, and un (which do not represent the actual pronunciation).
• Like zhuyin, what are actually pronounced as buo, puo, muo, and fuo are given a separate representation: bo, po, mo, and fo.
• The apostrophe (') is used before ?, o, and e to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise, e.g., pi'ao (??) vs. piao (?), and Xi'an (??) vs. xian (?).
• Eh! alone is written as ê; elsewhere as e. Schwa is always written as e.
• zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ?, ?, and ?. However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers.
• ng has the uncommon shorthand of ?.