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 It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo.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.

Pronunciation

The primary purpose of pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Mandarin pronunciation. Many in the West are under the mistaken belief that pinyin is used to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know, but this is incorrect as many Chinese do not use Mandarin at home, and therefore do not know the Mandarin pronunciation of words until they learn them in elementary school through the use of pinyin.

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Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, hence the pronunciation is relatively straightforward for Westerners. A pitfall for English-speaking novices is, however, the unusual pronunciation x, q, c and z (and sometimes i) and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, j. More information on the pronunciation of all pinyin letters in terms of English approximations is given further below.

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The pronunciation of Chinese is generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final consonant).

Related Topics:
Initials - Finals - Medials - Semivowel - Nucleus - Coda

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Initials

In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin.

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* {{IPA|}} and {{IPA|}} are interchangeable.

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Finals

In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. It is of interest to point out that there is no m finals in Mandarin. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals. 1

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1 /?r/ (?, ?, etc.) is written as er. For other finals formed by the suffix -r, pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends -r to the final that it is added to, without regard for any sound changes that may take place along the way. For information on sound changes related to final -r, please see Standard Mandarin.

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2 "ü" is written as "u" after j, q, or x.

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3 "uo" is written as "o" after b, p, m, or f.

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4 It is pronounced {{IPA|}} when it follows an initial, and pinyin reflects this difference.

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In addition, ê {{IPA|}} is used to represent certain interjections.

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