A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | CH | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
| Hanyu Pinyin | |
|---|---|
| Script type | romanization |
| Created | 1950s |
Time period |
|
| Languages | Standard Chinese |
| Pinyin | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese | 拼音 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | spelled sounds | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 汉语拼音方案 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 漢語拼音方案 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Literal meaning | scheme of spelled Han language sounds | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Romanization of Chinese |
|---|
| Mandarin |
| Wu |
| Yue |
| Min |
| Gan |
| Hakka |
| Xiang |
| Polylectal |
| See also |
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet.[1][2] It is the official system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system makes use of diacritics to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts, or when writing non-Chinese words in Chinese-language texts. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries. Hànyǔ (汉语; 漢語) literally means 'Han language'—meaning, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'.[3]
Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group led by Chinese linguists including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei[4] and Zhou Youguang,[5] who has been called the "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlier romanization systems. The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the First National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since.[6] The International Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin as ISO 7098 in 1982,[7] and the United Nations began using it in 1986.[5] Attempts to make Hanyu Pinyin the standard in Taiwan occurred in 2002 and 2009; the system has been official since the latter attempt.[8][9][10]
The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the language's segmental phonemic portion, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).
History
Background
Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitled Xizi Qiji (西字奇蹟; 'Miracle of Western Letters') and published in Beijing in 1605.[11] Twenty years later, fellow Jesuit Nicolas Trigault published 西儒耳目資; Xīrú ěrmù zī; 'Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati') in Hangzhou.[12] Neither book had any influence among the contemporary Chinese literati, and the romanizations they introduced primarily were useful for Westerners.[13]
During the late Qing, the reformer Song Shu (1862–1910) proposed that China adopt a phonetic writing system. A student of the scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had observed the effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning during his visits to Japan.[which?] While Song did not himself propose a transliteration system for Chinese, his discussion ultimately led to a proliferation of proposed schemes.[13] The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and further improved by Herbert Giles, presented in the 1892 Chinese–English Dictionary. It was popular, and was used in English-language publications outside China until 1979.[14] In 1943, the US military tapped Yale University to develop another romanization system for Mandarin Chinese intended for pilots flying over China—much more than previous systems, the result appears very similar to modern Hanyu Pinyin.
Development
Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei,[4] as well as Zhou Youguang who was an economist,[5] as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin",[5][15][16][17] worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the People's Republic was established. Initially, Mao Zedong considered the development of a new writing system for Chinese that only used the Latin alphabet, but during his first official visit to the Soviet Union in 1949, Joseph Stalin convinced him to maintain the existing system.[18] Zhou became an economics professor in Shanghai, and when the Ministry of Education created the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language in 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned him the task of developing a new romanization system[dubious ], despite the fact that he was not a linguist by trade.[5]
Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh from 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz from 1931, and the diacritics from bopomofo.[19] "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect."[20]
An initial draft was authored in January 1956 by Ye Laishi, Lu Zhiwei and Zhou Youguang.[21] A revised Pinyin scheme was proposed by Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei and Li Jinxi, and became the main focus of discussion among the group of Chinese linguists in June 1956, forming the basis of Pinyin standard later after incorporating a wide range of feedback and further revisions.[4][21][22] The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and officially adopted at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on 11 February 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults.[23]
During the height of the Cold War the use of pinyin system over the Yale romanization outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the mainland Chinese government.[24] Beginning in the early 1980s, Western publications addressing mainland China began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems;[25] this change followed the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1979.[26][27] In 2001, the PRC Government issued the National Common Language Law, providing a legal basis for applying pinyin.[23] The current specification of the orthographic rules is laid down in the National Standard GB/T 16159–2012.[28]
Syllables
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 basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language). Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known as 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 tight openings at the beginning of a final that 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 part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below.
Initials
The conventional lexicographical order derived from bopomofo is:
| b p m f | d t n l | g k h | j q x | zh ch sh r | z c s |
In each cell below, the pinyin letters assigned to each initial are accompanied by their phonetic realizations in brackets, notated according to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
| Labial | Alveolar | Retroflex | Alveolar-palatal | Velar | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | unaspirated | b | d | g | ||
| aspirated | p | t | k | |||
| Nasal | m | n | ||||
| Affricate | unaspirated | z | zh | j | ||
| aspirated | c | ch | q tɕʰ | |||
| Fricative | f f | s s | sh ʂ | x ɕ | h x | |
| Liquid | l l | r ɻ~ ʐ | ||||
| Semivowel | y j, ɥ and w w | |||||
| Pinyin | IPA | Description[29] |
|---|---|---|
| b | [p] | Unaspirated p, like in English spark. |
| p | [pʰ] | Strongly aspirated p, like in English pay. |
| m | [m] | Like the m in English may. |
| f | [f] | Like the f in English fair. |
| d | [t] | Unaspirated t, like in English stop. |
| t | [tʰ] | Strongly aspirated t, like in English take. |
| n | [n] | Like the n in English nay. |
| l | [l]~[ɾ][a] | Like the l in English lay. |
| g | [k] | Unaspirated k, like in English skill. |
| k | [kʰ] | Strongly aspirated k, like in English kiss. |
| h | [x]~[h][a] | Varies between the h in English hat, and the ch in Scottish English loch. |
| j | [tɕ] | Alveolar-palatal, unaspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the ch in English churchyard. |
| q | [tɕʰ] | Alveolar-palatal, aspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the ch in English punchy. |
| x | [ɕ] | Alveolo-palatal, unaspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the sh in English push. |
| zh | [ʈʂ]~[d͡ʒ][a] | Retroflex, unaspirated. Like j in English jack. |
| ch | [ʈʂʰ]~[ʃ][a] | Retroflex, aspirated. Like ch in English church. |
| sh | [ʂ]~[ɹ̠̊˔][a] | Retroflex, unaspirated. Like sh in shirt. |
| r | ɻ~ʐ~[ɹ][a] | Retroflex. No direct equivalent in English, but varies between the r in English reduce and the s in English measure. |
| z | [ts] | Unaspirated. Like the zz in English pizza. |
| c | [tsʰ] | Aspirated. Like the ts in English cats. |
| s | [s] | Like the s in English say. |
| w[b] | [w] | Like the w in English water. |
| y[b] | [j], [ɥ] | Either like the y in English yes—or when followed by a u, see below. |
Finalsedit
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
| Close | 
| |||||
| Close-mid | ||||||
| Open-mid | ||||||
| Open | ||||||
In each cell below, the first line indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the second indicates 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 following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.
The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n, -ng, and -r, the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese, reflecting final consonants in Old Chinese), or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones.
| Rime | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ∅ | -e/-o/-ê | -a | -ei | -ai | -ou | -ao | -en | -an | -eng | -ang | er | ||||||
| Medial | ∅ | ɨ -i |
ɤ e -e |
ɛ ê -ê |
a a -a |
ei̯ ei -ei |
ai̯ ai -ai |
ou̯ ou -ou |
au̯ ao -ao |
ən en -en |
an an -an |
əŋ eng -eng |
aŋ ang -ang |
ɚ er | |||
| y- -i- |
i yi -i |
je ye -ie |
ja ya -ia |
jou̯ you -iu |
jau̯ yao -iao |
in yin -in |
jɛn yan -ian |
iŋ ying -ing |
jaŋ yang -iang |
||||||||
| w- -u- |
u wu -u |
wo wo -uo |
wa wa -ua |
wei̯ wei -ui |
wai̯ wai -uai |
wən wen -un |
wan wan -uan |
wəŋ~ʊŋ weng -ong |
waŋ wang -uang |
||||||||
| yu- -ü- |
y yu -ü |
ɥe yue -üe |
yn yun -ün |
ɥɛn yuan -üan |
jʊŋ yong -iong |
||||||||||||
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, Chinese: 唔), ng (嗯, 𠮾) are used as interjections or in neologisms; for example, pinyin defines the names of several pinyin letters using -ê finals.
According to the 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.