1.
Alphabet
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters that is used to write one or more languages based upon the general principle that the letters represent phonemes of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries and logographies, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. Under a terminological distinction promoted by Peter T. Daniels, an alphabet is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, in other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants, such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal letters, as in Devanagari. The Khmer alphabet is the longest, with 74 letters, there are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet. Many languages use modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks, while most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Alphabets are usually associated with an ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order and it also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of numbering ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, the Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, which also meant ox, and bet, in the alphabet song in English, the term ABCs is used instead of the word alphabet. Knowing ones ABCs, in general, can be used as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything, the history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. These glyphs were used as guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs and this script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three that indicate the vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit, the Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called Proto-Canaanite before ca.1050 BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram and this script is the parent script of all western alphabets
2.
Manchu language
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Manchu is a severely endangered Tungusic language spoken in Manchuria, it was the native language of the Manchus and one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty of China. Most Manchus now speak Mandarin Chinese, according to data from UNESCO, there are 10 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Manchu language enjoys high historical value for historians of China, especially for the Qing dynasty and they supply information that is unavailable in Chinese and, when both Manchu and Chinese versions of a given text exist, they provide controls for understanding the Chinese. Like most Siberian languages, Manchu is a language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many words from Mongolian. Its script is written and taken from the Mongolian alphabet. The Manchu language uses the Manchu script, which was derived from the traditional Mongol script, Manchu is usually romanized according to the system devised by Paul Georg von Möllendorff in his Manchu grammar. Its ancestor, Jurchen, used the Jurchen script, which is derived from the Khitan script, there is no relation between the Jurchen script and the Manchu script Chinese Characters can also be used to transliterate Manchu. Mongols learnt their script as a syllabary, dividing the syllables into twelve different classes, based on the final phonemes of the syllables, all of which ended in vowels. The Manchus followed the same syllabic method when learning Manchu script, today, the opinion on whether it is alphabet or syllabic in nature is still split between different experts. In China, it is considered syllabic and Manchu is still taught in this manner, the alphabetic approach is used mainly by foreigners who want to learn the language. Studying Manchu script as a syllabary takes a longer time, Manchus when learning, instead of saying I, a---la, I, o---lo, &c. were taught at once to say la, lo, &c. Many more syllables than are contained in their syllabary might have formed with their letters. The Qing dynasty referred to the Manchu language in various Chinese titles such as Qingwen 清文, or Qingyu 清語 and Guoyu 國語, the national was also applied to the Manchu writing as in Guowen 國文 in addition to Guoyu 國語. In the Manchu language version of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the term Chinese language referred to all three Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol languages, not just one language, Guoyu now refers to Standard Chinese. In 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchen people and Jurchen language as Manchu, Manchu began as a primary language of the Qing dynasty Imperial court, but as Manchu officials became increasingly sinicized, many started losing the language. Trying to preserve the Manchu identity, the government instituted Manchu language classes and examinations for the bannermen. Chinese classics and fiction were translated into Manchu, and a body of Manchu literature accumulated, as the Yongzheng Emperor explained, If some special encouragement … is not offered, the ancestral language will not be passed on and learned
3.
Xibe language
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The Xibe language is the most widely spoken of the Tungusic languages spoken by members of the ethnic group in Xinjiang, in the northwest of the Peoples Republic of China. Some researchers such as Jerry Norman hold that Xibe is a dialect of Manchu, whereas other Xibologists, such as An Jun, argue that Xibe should be considered the successor to Manchu. Ethnohistorically, the Xibe people are not considered Manchu people, because they were excluded from chieftain Nurhacis 17th-century tribal confederation to which the name Manchu was later applied, Xibe has 7 case morphemes,3 of which are used quite differently from modern Manchu. The categorization of morphemes as case markers in spoken Xibe is partially due to the status of numerous suffixes in the language. Despite the general controversy about the categorization of case markers versus postpositions in Tungusic languages,4 case markers in Xibe are shared with literary Manchu. Xibes 3 innovated cases, the ablative, lative and instrumental-sociative share their meanings with similar forms in neighboring Uyghur, Kazakh. The general vocabulary and structure of Xibe has not been affected as much by Chinese as Manchu has, however, Xibe has absorbed a large body of Chinese sociological terminology, especially in politics, like gəming and zhuxi, and economics, like chūna and daikuan. Written Xibe is more conservative and rejecting of loanwords, but spoken Xibe contains additional Chinese-derived vocabulary such as nan for man where the Manchu-based equivalent is niyalma, there has also been some influence from Russian, including words such as konsul and mashina. Smaller Xinjiang languages contribute mostly cultural terminology, such as namas from Uygur, Xibe is written in a script that derived from the Manchu alphabet. There was a proposal in China by 1957 to adapt the Cyrillic alphabet to Xibe, see also, Manchu alphabet This lists the letters in Xibe that differentiate it from Manchu as well as the placement of the letters. In 1998, there were eight primary schools that taught Xibe in the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County, from 1954 to 1959, the Peoples Publishing House in Ürümqi has published over 285 significant works, including government documents, belles-lettres, and school books, in Xibe. Since 1946, the Xibe-language Qapqal News has been published in Yining, in Qapqal, Xibe-language programming is allocated 15 minutes per day of radio broadcasting and 15 to 30-minute television programmes broadcast one or twice per month. Xibe is taught as a language by the Ili Normal University in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of northern Xinjiang. A few Manchu language enthusiasts from Eastern China have visited Qapqal Xibe County in order to experience an environment where a variety closely related to Manchu is spoken natively, li, Shulan, 锡伯语简志/Outline of the Xibo language, Beijing, Nationalities Publishing House Ramsey, S. B. Radloff, Studies of Ethnic Literature, 60–63, archived from the original on September 29,2007 Raimundo Veronika, Spoken Sibe, Morphology of the Inflected Parts of Speech, ISBN9788024621036 Abkai — Unicode Manchu/Sibe/Daur Fonts and Keyboards SibeCulture. com, Xibe-English-Chinese phrases
4.
Proto-Sinaitic script
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It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F
5.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
6.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
7.
Syriac alphabet
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The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. Syriac is written right to left. It is a script where some, but not all. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the vowel sounds are supplied either by the readers memory or by optional diacritic marks. In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a similar to Hebrew. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni, Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers. There are three variants of the Syriac alphabet, ʾEsṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, and Serṭā. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā, although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has received some revival since the 10th century. It is often used in publications, in titles and inscriptions. In some older manuscripts and inscriptions it is possible for any letter to join to the left, vowel marks are usually not used with ʾEsṭrangēlā. The East Syriac dialect is written in the Maḏnḥāyā form of the alphabet. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, ʾĀṯūrāyā, Kaldāyā, the Eastern script resembles ʾEsṭrangēlā more closely than the Western script, being somewhat a midway point between the two. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons, whether because its distribution is mostly predictable or because its pronunciation was lost, neither the East nor West variants of the alphabet have a sign to represent the schwa. The West Syriac dialect is written in the Serṭā form of the alphabet, also known as the Pšīṭā, Maronite. Most of the letters are derived from ʾEsṭrangēlā, but are simplified. A cursive, chancery hand is evidenced in the earliest Syriac manuscripts, from the 8th century, the simpler Serṭā style came into fashion, perhaps because of its more economical use of parchment. The Nabataean alphabet was based on this form of Syriac handwriting, lowercase Omega, used only in the vocative interjection ʾō
8.
Sogdian alphabet
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The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdia. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet, the Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the Syriac alphabet. It was used throughout Central Asia, from the edge of Iran in the west, to China in the east, like the writing systems from which it is descended, the Sogdian writing system can be described as an abjad, but it also displays tendencies towards an alphabet. The script consists of 17 consonants, many of which have alternate forms for initial, middle, as in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants aleph, yodh and waw. However, unlike Aramaic and most abjads, these consonant signs would also serve to express the short vowels. To disambiguate long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel, the alphabet also includes several diacritics, which were used inconsistently. It is written right to left, but by the time it had evolved into its child system. Voiced and voiceless fricatives are not distinguished in the script. Aramaic logograms also appear in the script, remnants of adapting the Aramaic alphabet to the Sogdian language and these logograms are used mainly for functional words such as pronouns, articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. * those letters are not used in Sogdian words, Early Sogdian dates to the early fourth century C. E. and is characterized by distinct, separated graphemes. The sutra script appears around 500 C. E. while the cursive script develops approximately a century later, the cursive script is thus named because its letters are connected with a base line. Since many letters in the script are extremely similar in form, to the point of being indistinguishable. As the Sogdian alphabet became more cursive and more stylized, some became more difficult to distinguish, or were distinguished only in final position. The Sogdian script is known from texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as from secular sources such as letters, coins. The oldest known Sogdian documents are the Ancient Letters, found in 1920 by Sir Aurel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang and these letters date to approximately 312-313 C. E. and are written in Early Sogdian. The Sogdian Buddhist texts, written in the script, are younger. They were found during the first two decades of the century in one of the caves of the Thousand Buddhas in the Chinese province of Gansu. The bulk of these reside in the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France
9.
Old Uyghur alphabet
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The Old Uyghur alphabet was used for writing the Old Uyghur language, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turfan and Gansu that is an ancestor of the modern Yugur language. It was an adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet used for texts with Buddhist, the last known manuscripts are dated to the 18th century. This was the prototype for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets, the Old Uyghur alphabet was brought to Mongolia by Tata-tonga. Like the Sogdian alphabet, the Old Uyghur tended to use matres lectionis for the vowels as well as for the short ones. The practice of leaving short vowels unrepresented was almost completely abandoned, thus, while ultimately deriving from a Semitic abjad, the Old Uyghur alphabet can be said to have been largely alphabetized. Uyghur alphabets Gorelova, Liliya M. Manchu Grammar, Old Uyghur Alphabet on Omniglot Old Uyghur alphabet and Orkhon Turkic alphabet photos of the original text fragments written in Old Uyghur script discovered at Turpan
10.
Mongolian script
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Derived from Sogdian, Mongolian is a true alphabet, with separate letters for consonants and vowels. The Mongolian script has adapted to write languages such as Oirat. Alphabets based on this classical vertical script are used in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China to this day to write Mongolian, Xibe and, experimentally, the Mongolian vertical script developed as an adaptation of the Sogdian to the Mongolian language. From the seventh and eighth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the western dialect, materials of the Arab-Mongolian and Persian-Mongolian dictionaries, Mongolian texts in Arabic transcription, etc. The development over this period explains why Mongolian script looks like a vertical Arabic script, zain was dropped as it was redundant for. Various schools of orthography, some using diacritics, were developed to avoid ambiguity, the Uyghur script and its descendants—Mongolian, Oirat Clear, Manchu, and Buryat—are the only vertical scripts written from left to right. Mongols learned their script as a syllabary, dividing the syllables into twelve different classes, based on the final phonemes of the syllables, all of which ended in vowels. The Manchus followed the same syllabic method when learning Manchu script, Manchus when learning, instead of saying l, a---la, l, o---lo, etc. were taught at once to say la, lo, etc. Many more syllables than are contained in their syllabary might have formed with their letters. Manchu children were taught the language via the syllabic method, some westerners learn the script in an alphabetic manner instead. Today, the opinion on whether it is alphabet or syllabic in nature is still split between different experts, in China, it is considered syllabic and Manchu is still taught in this manner. The alphabetic approach is used mainly by foreigners who want to learn the language, studying Manchu script as a syllabary takes a longer time. The Traditional Mongolian script is known by a variety of names. Due to its shape like Uighur script, it known as the Uighurjin Mongol script. The name Old Mongol script stuck, and it is known as such among the older generation. It does not distinguish several vowels and consonants that were not required for Uyghur, the result is somewhat comparable to the situation of English, which must represent ten or more vowels with only five letters and uses the digraph th for two distinct sounds. Ambiguity is sometimes prevented by context, as the requirements of vowel harmony, moreover, as there are few words with an exactly identical spelling, actual ambiguities are rare for a reader who knows the orthography. Letters have different forms depending on their position in a word, initial, medial, in some cases, additional graphic variants are selected for visual harmony with the subsequent character
11.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
12.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
13.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
14.
Romanization of Chinese
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The Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to write Chinese. Chinese uses a script, and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history, linguist Daniel Kane recalls, It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys. However, Hanyu Pinyin has become the standard since 1982. Other well-known systems include Wade-Giles and Yale Romanization, there are many uses for Chinese Romanization. Most broadly, it used to provide a way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script a means to read. Apart from this role, it serves as a useful tool for foreign learners of Chinese by indicating the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation—Chinese pronunciation is an issue for some speakers of mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties who do not speak Mandarin fluently. Standard keyboards such as QWERTY are designed for the Latin alphabet, Chinese dictionaries have complex and competing sorting rules for characters, and romanization systems can simplify the problem by listing the characters by their Latin form alphabetically. Romanization systems for other Chinese varieties are indicated in the box on the right side of this page. This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie system, and it is the principle of all modern systems. Aside from syllable structure, it is necessary to indicate tones in Chinese romanization. Tones distinguish the definition of all morphemes in Chinese, and the definition of a word is ambiguous in the absence of tones. Certain systems such as Wade-Giles indicate tone with a following the syllable, ma1, ma2, ma3. Others, like Pinyin, indicate the tone diacritics, mā, má, mǎ. Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, making the syntactic structure of Chinese intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar. Allowing instant communication in colloquial Chinese between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book, identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context. Such a system has to work vertically down the page, right-to-left, reciting a Chinese text in Mandarin for some literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese, who do not speak Mandarin fluently
15.
Mandarin Chinese
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Mandarin is a group of related varieties of Chinese spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Mandarin or Standard Chinese, because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects. Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible, nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in any list of languages by number of native speakers. Most Mandarin varieties have four tones, the final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, the capital has been within the Mandarin area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca since the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a form based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is the language of the Peoples Republic of China and Taiwan. It is also one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally, the English word mandarin originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires. Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties, when Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it Mandarin, from its Chinese name Guānhuà, or language of the officials. In everyday English, Mandarin refers to Standard Chinese, which is called simply Chinese. Standard Chinese is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing, with some lexical and it is the official spoken language of the Peoples Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China, and one of the four official languages of the Republic of Singapore. It also functions as the language of instruction in Mainland China and it is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name Chinese. Chinese speakers refer to the standard language as Pǔtōnghuà in Mainland China, Guóyǔ in Taiwan, or Huáyǔ in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. Linguists use the term Mandarin to refer to the group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. The alternative term Běifānghuà, or Northern dialects, is used less and less among Chinese linguists, by extension, the term Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty. Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of Mandarin in a broader sense, the hundreds of modern local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven groups of dialects have been recognized
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Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan, aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or common tongue/speech, was different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name Huayu to refer to Mandarin and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, in English, Mandarin may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name Modern Standard Mandarin is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times
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Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
18.
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh, abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao, Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR. In addition a number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong. GR is the better known of the two systems which indicate the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables. These tones are as fundamental to the Chinese language as vowels are to English, other systems indicate the tones with either diacritics or numbers. GR spells the same four tones ai, air, ae and these spellings, which follow specific rules, indicate the tones while retaining the pronunciation of the syllable ai. Chao claimed that, because GR embeds the tone of each syllable in its spelling, one study however, found the opposite to be true in a study of GR. In 1928 China adopted GR as the official romanization system. GR was used to indicate pronunciations in dictionaries of the National Language and its proponents hoped one day to establish it as a writing system for a reformed Chinese script. But despite support from a number of trained linguists in China and overseas, GR met with public indifference. Another obstacle preventing its widespread adoption was its basis on the Beijing dialect. Eventually GR lost ground to Pinyin and other later romanization systems, however, its influence is still evident, as several of the principles introduced by its creators have been used in romanization systems that followed it. Its pattern of tone spelling was retained in the spelling of the Chinese province of Shaanxi. Tonal spelling, Gwoyeu Romatzyhs most distinctive feature, was first suggested to Y. R, by 1922 Chao had already established the main principles of GR. In 1928 GR was officially adopted by the government, GR was intended to be used alongside the existing Juhin phonetic symbols, hence the alternative name for GR, Second Pattern of the National Alphabet. Both systems were used to indicate the revised standard of pronunciation in the new official Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use of 1932, the designers of GR had greater ambitions, their aim was complete reform of the script, using GR as a practical system of writing. In the 1930s two shortlived attempts were made to teach GR to railway workers and peasants in Hénán and Shāndōng provinces, support for GR, being confined to a small number of trained linguists and Sinologists, was distinguished more for its quality than its quantity. During this period GR faced increasing hostility because of the complexity of its tonal spelling, conversely, Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren criticised GR for its lack of phonetic rigour
19.
Latinxua Sin Wenz
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Latinxua Sin Wenz is a little-used romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It was usually written without tones under the assumption that the proper tones could be understood from context, Latinxua is historically notable as being the first romanization system used in place of Chinese characters by native Chinese speakers. It was originally developed by groups of Chinese and Russian scholars in the Soviet Union and used by Chinese immigrants there until the majority of them left the country. Later, it was revived for some time in Northern China where it was used in over 300 publications before its usage was ended by the Peoples Republic of China. S. S. R, could be made literate, facilitating their further education. They decided to use the Latin alphabet because they thought that it would serve their purpose better than Cyrillic, unlike Gwoyeu Romatzyh, with its complex method of indicating tones, Latinxua Sin Wenz system does not indicate tones at all. The eminent Moscow-based Chinese scholar Qu Qiubai and the Russian linguist V. S, kolokolov devised a prototype romanization system in 1929. In 1931 a coordinated effort between the Soviet sinologists V. M, dragunov and A. G. Shrprintsin, and the Moscow-based Chinese scholars Qu Qiubai, Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu, Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao, and Xu Teli established the Latinxua Sin Wenz system. In November 1949, the railways in Chinas north-east adopted the Latinxua Sin Wenz system for all their telecommunications, for a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in Northern China, and more than 300 publications totaling half a million issues appeared in Latinxua Sin Wenz. However, In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the areas on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system. Sin Wenz was designed so that every dialect had its own form of the alphabet, the letters below represent only one of the thirteen possible schemes present, the below form being that for Northern Mandarin. Much of Sin Wenz is similar to Pinyin in its orthography, however, palatal affricates are written with the same letters as velar stops, so Beijing is written as Beiging in Sin Wenz. Other differences include the usage of x for both the sounds and, so the characters 畫 and 下 are written as xua and xia. Key, Sin Wenz differs from Pinyin Sin Wenz exhibits some interchangeability symbol for alveolo-palatal between g, k, x z, c, s. For example, 新 can be written as xin or sin in Sin Wenz and this is because Sin Wenz generally distinguishes sequences from, which distinction is lost in Standard Mandarin and not made by Pinyin. Key, Sin Wenz differs from Pinyin 1e and ye is written as o, for example, gogo, xyosheng 2The word 有 is written as iou. Other words with the sound is written as iu. As in pinyin, spacing in Sin Wenz is based on whole words, except for u, others syllables starting with u is always written with a w replacing the u. The syllable u is only preceded by a w when it occurs in the middle of a word, for syllables starting with i, the i is replaced by a j only in the middle of a word
20.
Chinese postal romanization
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Postal romanization was a system of transliterating Chinese place names developed by the Imperial Post Office in the early 1900s. The system was in use until the 1980s. For major cities and other places that already had widely accepted European names, with regard to other place names, the post office revised policy several times. Spellings given could reflect the pronunciation, Nanjing pronunciation, or Beijing pronunciation. At a conference held in 1906 in Shanghai, the post office selected a system of romanization developed by Herbert Giles called Nanking syllabary, although Beijing dialect had served as a national standard since the mid-19th century, the system adopted was based on Nanjing pronunciation. The system corresponded to traditional romanizations that were adopted in the 18th century when Nanjing dialect was considered standard. French-appointed administrators ran the post office at time, and they sought a less anglicized alternative to Wade-Giles. An imperial edict issued in 1896 renamed the Maritime Customs Post, reorganized this agency as a postal service. In 1899, Robert Hart, as general of posts. Although Hart asked for transliterations according to the pronunciation, most postmasters were reluctant to play lexicographer. The spellings that they submitted generally followed a system created by Thomas Francis Wade, the system had been developed in 1859 and was based on the Beijing pronunciation. It became the method of romanizing Chinese after Herbert Giles published a dictionary, using the system. The post office published a draft romanization map in 1903, disappointed with the Wade-based map, Hart made another attempt to promote localism in 1905. He directed the postmasters to submit romanizations not as directed by Wade, local missionaries could be consulted, Hart suggested. However, Wades system reflected pronunciation in most areas served by the post office, a more serious disadvantage was that the French viewed Wades system as anglophone. The top position in the post office was held by Postal Secretary Théophile Piry, until 1911, the post office remained part of the Maritime Customs Service. As customs inspector general, Hart was Pirys boss, but French backing effectively gave Piry a postal fiefdom, Piry responded to Harts moves by organising an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference in Shanghai in the spring of 1906. As it was a joint postal and telegraphic conference, it allowed Piry to go over Harts head, the conference resolved that existing spellings would be retained for all names already transliterated
21.
Sichuanese dialects
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In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language. Sichuanese is more similar to Standard Chinese than southeastern Chinese varieties but is quite divergent in phonology, vocabulary. The Minjiang dialect is difficult for speakers of other Mandarin dialects to understand. Sichuanese can be divided into a number of dialects, Chengdu–Chongqing dialect, Minjiang dialect, Renshou–Fushun dialect. The influence of Sichuanese has resulted in a form of Standard Chinese that is often confused with real Sichuanese. Sichuanese, spoken by about 120 million people, would rank 10th among languages by number of speakers if counted as a separate language. Sichuanese is mainly spoken in and around the Sichuan Basin, which includes almost all of Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality except for some Tibetan and it is also spoken in the border regions of Sichuans neighboring provinces, northern Yunnan and Guizhou, southern Shaanxi and western Hubei. Thus, these dialects are referred as Old Sichuanese, as the preserve many characteristics of Bashu. The Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, named after the two largest cities in greater Sichuan, are spoken in an area mainly in North. It is often referred as New Sichuanese because it exhibits characteristics of the Bashu language. Like many of the provinces in China, Sichuan was fully sinicized by the end of the Tang Dynasty. The modern variety of Chinese spoken in the region formed relatively recently, in the thirteenth century, the population of Sichuan dropped precipitously, suspected to be due in part to a series of plagues and Mongol invasions. The population did not recover until it was replenished by subsequent migrations from Hubei, as well as Xiang, Gan and these varieties largely supplanted the earlier varieties of Chinese in Sichuan, known as Ba-Shu Chinese or Old Sichuanese. There are five phonemic tones in Sichuanese, dark tone, light level tone, rising tone, departing tone. According to Phonology of Sichuan dialect, among all the 150 Sichuanese-speaking cities and counties,48 keep the tone while the other 102 have only 4 tones. Particularly, in some sub-dialects of Minjiang dialect, the tone has developed into two different tones, a colloquial tone and a literary tone. The tone contours of the Sichuanese dialects are highly and quite different from those of Beijing Mandarin, in the areas which keep the entering tone, the five tones of Sichuanese are nearly identical to the values of 5 of the 6 tones of the indigenous Southern Qiang language. Initials are initial consonants of possible syllables, there are 21 initials in the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese
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Sichuanese Pinyin
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Sichuanese Pinyin, is a romanization system specifically designed for the Chengdu dialect of Sichuanese. It is mostly used in selected Sichuanese dictionaries, such as the Sichuan Dialect Dictionary, Sichuan Dialects Vocabulary Explanation, Sichuanese Pinyin is based on Hanyu Pinyin, the only Chinese romanization system officially instructed within the Peoples Republic of China, for convenience amongst users. The number is placed on the top corner of every syllable, where 1 stands for the first tone,2 stands for the second tone. The rules of Sichuanese Pinyin are based on those of Hanyu Pinyin, the following sample text is a selection of Sichuanese idioms in Sichuanese Pinyin, Scuanxua Ladinxua Xin Wenz and Hanyu Pinyin, for comparative purposes
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Wu Chinese
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Wu is a group of linguistically similar and historically related varieties of Chinese primarily spoken in the whole city of Shanghai, Zhejiang province, southern Jiangsu province and bordering areas. Major Wu varieties include those of Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Wenzhou/Oujiang, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Wu speakers, such as Chiang Kai-shek, Lu Xun and Cai Yuanpei, occupied positions of great importance in modern Chinese culture and politics. Wu can also be found being used in Shaoxing opera, which is only in national popularity to Peking opera, as well as in the performances of the popular entertainer. Wu is also spoken in a number of diaspora communities, with significant centers of immigration originating from Shanghai, Qingtian. Suzhou has traditionally been the center of Wu and was likely the first place the distinct variety of Sinitic known as Wu developed. Suzhou dialect is considered to be the most linguistically representative of the family. Due to the influence of Shanghainese, Wu as a whole is incorrectly labelled in English as simply, Shanghainese, among speakers of other Sinitic languages, Wu is often subjectively judged to be soft, light, and flowing. There is an idiom in Mandarin that specifically describes these qualities of Wu speech, Ngu nung nioe ngiu, Wu varieties have the largest vowel quality inventories in the world. The Jinhui dialect spoken in Shanghais Fengxian District has 20 vowel qualities, Wu Chinese, along with Min, is also of great significance to historical linguists due to their retention of many ancient features. These two languages have proven pivotal in determining the history of the Chinese languages. More pressing concerns of the present are those of language preservation, however, many analysts believe that a stable state of diglossia will endure for at least several generations if not indefinitely. Saying one speaks Wu is akin to saying one speaks a Romance language and it is not a particularly defined entity like Standard Mandarin or Hochdeutsch. They do this by affixing 話 Wo to their locations endonym, for example, 溫州話 Wēnzhōuhuà is used for Wenzhounese. Affixing 閒話 xiánhuà is also common and more typical of the Taihu division, Wu, the formal name and standard reference in dialectology literature. Northern Wu, Wu typically spoken in the north of Zhejiang and it by default includes the Xuanzhou division in Anhui as well, however this division is often neglected in Northern Wu discussions. Southern Wu, Wu spoken in southern Zhejiang and periphery, comprising the Oujiang, Wuzhou, Western Wu, A term gaining in usage as a synonym for the Xuanzhou division and modeled after the previous two terms since the Xuanzhou division is less representative of Northern Wu. Shanghainese, is also a common name, used because Shanghai is the most well-known city in the Wu-speaking region. The term Shanghainese is never used by linguists to refer to anything
24.
Yue Chinese
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Yue or Yueh is one of the primary branches of Chinese spoken in southern China, particularly the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, collectively known as Liangguang. The name Cantonese is often used for the branch, but linguists prefer to reserve that name for the variety of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau. Taishanese, from the area of Jiangmen located southwest of Guangzhou, was the language of most of the 19th-century emigrants from Guangdong to Southeast Asia. Most later migrants have been speakers of Cantonese, Yue varieties are not mutually intelligible with other varieties of Chinese. The prototypical use of the name Cantonese in English is for the Yue variety of Guangzhou, in Chinese, people of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as Cantonese immigrants abroad, usually call their language Gwóngdùng wá speech of Guangdong. The people of Guangdong and Guangxi do not use that term and they also use baahk wá on its own to refer to the Guangzhou dialect. It is also used in Guangxi to refer to Yue varieties, as for example in an expression like 南寧白話, the area of China south of the Nanling Mountains, known as the Lingnan, was originally home to peoples known to the Chinese as the Hundred Yue. Large-scale Han Chinese migration to the area began after the Qin conquest of the region in 214 BC, successive waves followed at times of upheaval in North China, such as the falls of the Han, Tang and Song dynasties. The most popular route was via the Xiang River, which the Qin had connected to the Li River by the Lingqu Canal, a secondary route followed the Gan River and then the Bei Jiang into eastern Guangdong. Yue-speakers were later joined by Hakka-speakers following the North River route, after the fall of Qin, the Lingnan area was part of the independent state of Nanyue for about a century, before being incorporated in the Han empire. After the Tang dynasty collapsed, much of the Yue area became part of the Southern Han, one of the states of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. The waves of Chinese migration assimilated huge numbers of aborigines, with the result that todays Yue-speaking population is descended from both groups. The colloquial layers of Yue varieties contain elements influenced by the Tai languages formerly spoken widely in the area and still spoken by people such as the Zhuang. The port city of Guangzhou lies in the middle of Pearl River Delta, with access to the interior via the West River, North River and East River and it has been the economic centre of the Lingnan region since Qin times, when it was an important shipbuilding centre. By 660, it was the largest port in China, part of a network stretching as far as Arabia. During the Southern Song, it became the cultural centre of the region. Like many other Chinese varieties it developed a distinct literary layer associated with the tradition of reading the classics. The Guangzhou dialect was used in the popular Yuèōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, there was also a small amount of vernacular literature, written with Chinese characters extended with a number of non-traditional characters for Cantonese words
25.
Cantonese
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Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou in southeastern China. It is the prestige variety of Yue, one of the major subdivisions of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and some neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese serves as one of their official languages and it is also spoken amongst overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western World. When Cantonese and the closely related Yuehai dialects are classified together, Cantonese is viewed as vital part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. This results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar, in English, the term Cantonese is ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton and this narrow sense may be specified as Canton language or Guangzhou language in English. However, Cantonese may also refer to the branch of Cantonese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, Cantonese is used for Cantonese proper, historically, speakers called this variety Canton speech or Guangzhou speech, although this term is now seldom used outside mainland China. In Guangdong province, people call it provincial capital speech or plain speech. In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, in mainland China, the term Guangdong speech is also increasingly being used among both native and non-native speakers. Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Cantonese or Yue branch of Chinese varieties, the official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese and English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has different varieties, of which Cantonese is one. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and it is also used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language along with Portuguese. As in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The variant spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is known as Hong Kong Cantonese, Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China
26.
Jyutping
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Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme, the LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. The name Jyutping is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5, only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables. ^ ^ ^ Referring to the pronunciation of these words. There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese, however, as three of the nine are entering tones, which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping. Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they differ in the following, The vowels eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, the initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale. The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale, the initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale. In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel, in Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances. Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, and ep /ɛːp/ and these three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6, lem2, and gep6. To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h. Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the letters in, The initials, b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw. The vowel, aa, a, e, i, o, u, the coda, i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k. But they have differences, The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping. The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu and i are used in Jyutping, the initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping. The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping. To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, however, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping
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Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation
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It is not known whether there are strict guidelines for the method circulating in the government, or the method has just established itself and become a common practice over time. The system has been used by the Hong Kong Government from the very early days of British rule. The convention is similar to the one devised by Ernst Johann Eitel, since the method is not standardised, Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau has approved a Cantonese Pinyin system for teachers in primary and secondary schools. Besides this, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong promotes their own Jyutping system, both schemes are employed by the government to illustrate accurate pronunciation of Cantonese words. This article illustrates and explains how the nouns in Hong Kong are transcribed and romanised. The Hong Kong Government adopts the Eitel/Dyer-Ball system of romanisation, which is based on the spoken Cantonese language and it was first adopted in 1960 to standardise the romanisation of place-names throughout Hong Kong. The standardised place-names were published in the 1960 government publication A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon, prior to this 1960 publication, there was no standard, consistent way of romanising place-names in the territory, which, predictably, often led to confusion. Since then, the system has been extended to the names of local Chinese. For place-names, the type of the place in English are often used instead of a romanisation, wan and Bay, Tsuen and Estate, are, however, equally common. Some places, such as Un Long, was renamed as Yuen Long according to this standard. Nonetheless, the names Hong Kong and Kowloon are not transliterated based on this system and it is not a fully standardised system, and many of the phonemes correspond to more than one letter combination or the other way round. All tones are omitted as are distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated stops, the distinctions between the long vowel and the short vowel are omitted like Fat and Fat. Some of the inconsistencies are due to a distinction that has been lost historically and these consonants are no longer distinguished in present-day speech. Under the following table, geographical names are used to illustrate, initials Finals ^ The standard pronunciation of 五 is. However, a common pronunciation in Hong Kong is and many words are merging with it. The only word that was pronounced as m̩ is 唔. The sound ng is pronounced as in Cantonese, however, because initial /ŋ/ does not occur in English, English speakers usually have difficulty with them, the sound sh is pronounced as English sh, despite such a sound being absent from Cantonese. In Canada, ts is usually mispronounced as a simple /s/ or /z/ even among the Chinese, the letters p, t, k are pronounced as in English
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S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
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For Cantonese romanisation scheme derived by S. L. Wong, see S. L. Wong. Wong Shik Ling published a scheme of phonetic symbols for Cantonese based on the International Phonetic Alphabet in the book A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton, the scheme has been widely used in Chinese dictionaries published in Hong Kong. The scheme, known as S. L. Wong system, is a phonemic transcription system based on IPA. Other than the phonemic system, Wong also derived a romanisation scheme published in the same book. Before devising the system, Wong studied many phonetic transcription and romanisation systems, including Eitels and other earlier schemes and he found that many of them were not accurate enough for use. He researched Cantonese and published his results in the book in 1938, Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau formulates Cantonese Pinyin romanisations based on the system. It should be noted that the various narrow transcriptions by different scholars are not identical due to the scholars’ differing analyses of the Cantonese phonemes, Cantonese, like other varieties of Chinese, is monosyllabic. Each syllable is divided into an initial, final and tone, Chinese phonology traditionally stresses finals because they are related to rhymes in the composition of poems, proses and articles. There are 53 finals in Cantonese, except /aː/ and /ɐ/, long and short vowels in Cantonese have complementary distributions and therefore do not function contrastively. Thus, /i/ and /ɪ/ can be considered the same phoneme /i/, the same can be said of /u/ and /ʊ/, the long vowel symbol ː can also be omitted since these allophonic long and short vowels have different points of articulation in modern Cantonese. For the long Close-mid back rounded vowel /o/, ⟨ou⟩ is used instead of ⟨oː⟩ in IPA, /ɐ/ must be followed by vowels /i/, /u/ or finals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /p/, /t/, /k/. The use of a phonetic transcription for vowels, for example distinguishing between /i/ and /ɪ/. When adopting a phonetic transcription for vowels, the symbol /ɵ/ is often replaced by the symbol /ø/, all vowel phonemes except /ɐ/ form 9 finals themselves. Here are the 53 finals in a table, ^ Character example with initial, in absent of initial, /i/ pronounced with becomes, /iu/ becomes, /im/ becomes, /ip/ becomes, and so forth. In the absence of an initial, /u/ pronounced with becomes, /ui/ becomes, /un/ becomes, in the absence of an initial, /y/ pronounced with becomes, /yn/ becomes, /yt/ becomes. Initials are made up of consonants, most characters are preceding finals with initials while some characters are pronounced without initials. There are 19 initials in total, unlike English, Cantonese has no voiced-voiceless contrast. Instead, aspirated-unaspirated contrast plays an important role in distinguishing meanings, since there are no voiced plosive and affricative consonants in Cantonese, the scheme makes use of these unused voiced symbols for unaspirated
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