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Many non-native Chinese speakers have difficulties mastering the tones of each character, but correct tonal pronunciation is essential for intelligibility because of the vast number of words in the language that only differ by tone (i.e. are minimal pairs with respect to tone). Statistically, tones are as important as vowels in Standard Chinese.
Korean, Vietnamese, some Chinese dialects and minority languages (such as Zhuang and Yao) that use Chinese characters also have similar pronunciation methods for Chinese characters. In Korea, kun'yomi is called "interpretation reading" (釋讀). These phenomena also appear in Mandarin and English, such as "i.e." is read as "that is".
The voiceless stops that typify the entering tone date back to the Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the parent language of Chinese as well as the Tibeto-Burman languages.In addition, Old Chinese is commonly thought to have syllables ending in clusters /ps/, /ts/, and /ks/ [1] [2] (sometimes called the "long entering tone" while syllables ending in /p/, /t/ and /k/ are the "short entering tone").
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Wu Chinese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Wu Chinese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Standard Chinese is written with characters corresponding to syllables of the language, most of which represent a morpheme. In most cases, these characters come from those used in Classical Chinese to write cognate morphemes of late Old Chinese, though their pronunciation, and often meaning, has shifted dramatically over two millennia. [104]
Exclamative particles are used as a method of recording aspects of human speech which may not be based entirely on meaning and definition. Specific characters are used to record exclamations, as with any other form of Chinese vocabulary, some characters exclusively representing the expression (such as 哼), others sharing characters with alternate words and meanings (such as 可).
In syntax, Classical Chinese words are not restrictively categorized into parts of speech: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no copula in Classical Chinese; 是 (shì) is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ('this'), the modern Chinese equivalent of which is 這 ...
In Old Chinese, the phonetic has the reconstructed pronunciation *lo, while the phono-semantic compounds listed above have been reconstructed as *lo *l̥o and *l̥ˤo respectively. [39] Nonetheless, all characters containing 俞 are pronounced in Standard Chinese as various tonal variants of yu, shu, tou, and the closely related you and zhu.