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AH 203: Survey of Asian Art (Spring 2008)

Some Notes on the Chinese Language and How to Pronounce Chinese Words

There are two major elements of Chinese: 1) the spoken language, which includes many different dialects, and 2) the written language, which is based on individual symbols called characters, each of which represents an idea or thing, and is pronounced in a single syllable.

Many dialects are mutually unintelligible. As part of China's modernization in the 20th century, a dialect based on the regional speech of Beijing was created as the official language. In the People's Republic of China, it is called Putonghua ("common talking"), and its counterpart in the Republic of China (Taiwan) is called Guoyu ("national language"). In English, it is sometimes referred to as "Mandarin." Most people speak one or more dialects in addition to the official language, particularly in south China, where local dialects remain the preferred speech of everyday conversation and business.

All dialects use tones to help distinguish different words. Tones change the intonation of a syllable. Mandarin has four tones that can be applied to a given syllable, while Cantonese (a major dialect in south China) has nine tones, creating what has been described as a "singsong" effect. However, even with multiple tones, there are many more written characters than syllables. (The largest dictionary has over 40,000 characters!). This means that many different characters have exactly the same pronunciation.

Despite the evolutions of various types of script, the standard form ("orthography") of written characters has changed remarkably little in the last 2000 years. The simplest character has only one stroke (and, not surprisingly, it is the character that means "one"), while the most complicated characters have over 20 strokes. No matter how many strokes a character has, they are written in a prescribed order. To become literate requires many years of memorization and practice in writing characters. Historically, only a relatively small elite was able to devote the immense amount of time required to attain a high degree of literacy. Efforts to increase literacy led to the creation of "simplified characters," which are now used in the People's Republic but not in Taiwan.

Whether in traditional or simplified form, most characters consist of two parts, a "radical" (or classifying element, sometimes indicating something about the meaning) and a "phonetic" (which may provide a clue to pronunciation). Various systems based on ways of ordering these elements underlie the organization of characters in dictionaries and other reference works.

A number of systems have evolved over the past couple of centuries for rendering the sounds of Chinese into alphabetic letters (a process called "romanization"). For decades the most common system was Wade-Giles (named after two missionaries), which developed in the 19th century. In the United States, this is most often the system encountered in older publications. An alphabetic system called pinyin ("spelling the sounds"), based on the pronunciations of characters in the official language, has been used in the People's Republic since the early 1950s. American publications since 1980 have increasingly switched from Wade-Giles to pinyin. A chart that will help you convert spellings from Wade-Giles to pinyin can be found here.

Neither romanization system uses alphabetic letters exactly as in English, and special attention must be paid to certain conventions. Some consonants can only be used with certain vowels. The following chart indicates the pronunciation of some "problem" letters, with especially problematic ones in bold:

 

PINYIN WADE-GILES PRONOUNCE AS
a a "ah"
b p b as in "be"
c ts' ts as in "its"
ch ch' as in "church"
d t d as in "do"
g k g as in "go"
ian ien "yen"
j ch j as in "jeep"
k k' k as in "kind"
ong ung "oong"
p p' p as in "par"
q ch' ch as in "cheek"
r j approximately like the "j" in French "je"
s s, ss, sz s as in "sister"
sh sh sh as in "shore"
si szu "suh" as in "Yessuh"
t t' t as in "top"
x hs [hiss through your front teeth]
yi i "ee"
you yu yo as in "yoyo"
z ts dz as in "adze"
zh ch j as in "jump"
zi tzu "dzuh"

 

[Inspired by Paul Halsall's notes based on Compton's Living Encyclopedia, AOL 8/16/1995]