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Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [1] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language.
By contrast, many Southern Chinese who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronouncing the sound or may simply prefer not to pronounce it, and usually avoid words with erhua when speaking Standard Chinese; for example, the three examples listed above may be replaced with the synonyms 哪里 nǎlǐ, 一点 yìdiǎn, 好玩 hǎowán.
Mandarin uses Beijing pronunciation as the standard, and there are some words with variant sounds (异讀詞) in Beijing pronunciation. For example, some people pronounce "波浪" (waves) bōlàng, while others pronounce it pōlàng. In order to facilitate language teaching and application, each word with different pronunciations needs to be ...
The Hokkien word itself when dissected means, 番; hoan; 'foreign', + 仔; á; 'diminutive noun suffix', resulting in Hokkien Chinese: 番仔; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Hoan-á; lit. 'foreigner', originally from the perspective of ethnic Chinese referring to non-Chinese people, especially historically natives of Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as ...
For example, some people pronounce "波浪" (waves) bōlàng, while others pronounce it pōlàng. In order to facilitate language teaching and application, each word with different pronunciations needs to be determined a standard Mandarin pronunciation through phonetic review.
In particular, Chinese characters retain semantic cues that help distinguish differently pronounced words in the ancient classical language that are now homophones in Mandarin. Thus, Chinese characters remain indispensable for recording and transmitting the corpus of Chinese writing from the past.
The first entry in the Qieyun, with added highlighting of the fanqie formula. In the fanqie method, a character's pronunciation is represented by two other characters. The onset (initial consonant) is represented by that of the first of the two characters (上字 "upper word", as Chinese was written vertically); the final (including the medial glide, the nuclear vowel and the coda) and the ...