1.
Traditional Chinese characters
–
Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
Traditional Chinese characters
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Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese characters
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Job announcement in a Filipino Chinese daily newspaper written in Traditional Chinese characters.
Traditional Chinese characters
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A Series of Reading workbook in Traditional Chinese used in some Elementary schools in the Philippines.
2.
Simplified Chinese characters
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Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms, some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially dropped its goal of further simplification in the future, in August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters. The new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China, Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
Simplified Chinese characters
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Chinese characters
Simplified Chinese characters
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The slogan 战无不胜的毛泽东思想万岁 (Zhàn wúbù shèng de Máo Zédōng sīxiǎng wànsuì; Long live the invincible
Mao Zedong Thought) on
Xinhua Gate in Beijing.
Simplified Chinese characters
–
The first batch of Simplified Characters introduced in 1935 consisted of 324 characters.
3.
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
Standard Chinese
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A poster outside of high school in
Yangzhou urges people to speak Putonghua
Standard Chinese
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Zhongguo Guanhua (中国官话/中國官話), or Medii Regni Communis Loquela ("Middle Kingdom's Common Speech"), used on the frontispiece of an early Chinese grammar published by
Étienne Fourmont (with
Arcadio Huang) in 1742
4.
Hanyu 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
Hanyu Pinyin
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A school slogan asking elementary students to speak
Putonghua is annotated with pinyin, but without tonal marks.
Hanyu Pinyin
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In
Yiling,
Yichang,
Hubei, text on road signs appears both in Chinese characters and in Hanyu Pinyin
5.
Bopomofo
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Zhuyin fuhao, Zhuyin or Bopomofo is a system of phonetic notation for the transcription of spoken Chinese, particularly the Mandarin dialect. The first two are traditional terms, whereas Bopomofo is the term, also used by the ISO. Consisting of 37 characters and four marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Zhuyin was introduced in China by the Republican Government in the 1910s and used alongside the Wade-Giles system, the Wade system was replaced by Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 by the Government of the Peoples Republic of China, and at the International Organization for Standardization in 1982. The informal name Bopomofo is derived from the first four syllables in the ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The four Bopomofo characters that correspond to these syllables are placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. The original formal name of the system was Guóyīn Zìmǔ and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ and it was later renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào, meaning phonetic symbols. In official documents, Zhuyin is occasionally called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I, in English translations, the system is often also called either Chu-yin or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu, which was based on Zhang Binglins shorthand. A draft was released on July 11,1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education and it was later renamed first Guoyin Zimu and then, in April 1930, Zhuyin Fuhao. The last renaming addressed fears that the system might independently replace Chinese characters. Zhuyin remains the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in school in Taiwan. It is also one of the most popular ways to enter Chinese characters into computers and smartphones, in elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Zhuyin as ruby characters as an aid to learning. Additionally, one newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some communities use Zhuyin as a learning tool. The Zhuyin characters were created by Zhang Binglin, and taken mainly from regularised forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. It is to be noted that the first consonants are articulated from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, Zhuyin is written in the same stroke order rule as Chinese characters
Bopomofo
–
An example of a Zhuyin keypad for Taiwan.
Bopomofo
–
Table showing Zhuyin in
Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
6.
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
Romanization of Chinese
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Posters and slogans in and around Chinese schools often have each character annotated with its
Standard Chinese reading in Pinyin
Romanization of Chinese
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A 17th-century European map using the then-typical transcription of Chinese place names. Note the systematic use of x where Pinyin has sh, si where Pinyin has xi, and qu (stylized qv) where Pinyin uses gu
7.
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. 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. Aside from Mandarin, the six are Wu, Gan and Xiang in central China
Mandarin Chinese
–
A page of the
Menggu Ziyun, covering the syllables tsim to lim
Mandarin Chinese
–
Guānhuà (Mandarin) written in
Chinese characters
8.
Pinyin
–
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
Pinyin
–
A school slogan asking elementary students to speak
Putonghua is annotated with pinyin, but without tonal marks.
Pinyin
–
In
Yiling,
Yichang,
Hubei, text on road signs appears both in Chinese characters and in Hanyu Pinyin
9.
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
–
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
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
–
Lin Yutang, who first proposed tonal spelling
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
–
Yuen Ren Chao, the chief designer of GR, as a young man (c. 1916)
10.
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
Latinxua Sin Wenz
–
An issue of " Dazhung Bao " (大眾报, Dazhong Bao), a newspaper published in Latinxua in 1932
11.
Sichuanese Pinyin
–
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
Sichuanese Pinyin
–
Dialects
12.
Wu Chinese
–
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
Wu Chinese
–
Wu (Wú Yǔ) written in
Chinese characters
13.
Yue Chinese
–
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
Yue Chinese
–
Yuht Yúh/Jyut6 jyu5 (Yue) written in
traditional Chinese (left) and
simplified Chinese (right) characters
14.
Cantonese
–
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
Cantonese
–
Street in
Chinatown, San Francisco. Cantonese has traditionally been the dominant Chinese variant among Chinese populations in the Western world.
Cantonese
–
Gwóngdūng Wah / gwong 2 dung 1 waa 6 (Cantonese) written in
traditional Chinese (left) and
simplified Chinese (right) characters
Cantonese
–
Chinese dictionary from Tang dynasty. Modern Cantonese pronunciation is more similar to Middle Chinese from this era than other Chinese varieties.
15.
Jyutping
–
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
Jyutping
–
Jyutping Romanization.
16.
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
Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation
–
Romanisation is not always consistent. In this example, note the two spellings (shue/shuo) of the character shue (樹).
17.
S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
–
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
S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
–
i • y
18.
Southern Min
–
Southern Min, or Minnan, is a branch of Min Chinese spoken in certain parts of China including southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, and southern Zhejiang, and in Taiwan. The Min Nan dialects are spoken by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora, most notably the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to Hokkien, including Amoy and Taiwanese Hokkien, the Southern Min dialect group also includes Teochew, though Teochew has limited mutual intelligibility with Hokkien. Hainanese is not mutually intellgible with other Southern Min and is considered a separate branch of Min. Southern Min is not mutually intelligible with Eastern Min, Pu-Xian Min, any other Min branch, Hakka, Cantonese, Shanghainese or Mandarin. Southern Min dialects are spoken in the part of Fujian. The variant spoken in Leizhou, Guangdong as well as Hainan is Hainanese and is not mutually intelligible with other Southern Min or Teochew, Hainanese is classified in some schemes as part of Southern Min and in other schemes as separate. Puxian Min was originally based on the Quanzhou dialect, but over time became heavily influenced by Eastern Min, eventually losing intellegility with Minnan. A forms of Southern Min spoken in Taiwan, collectively known as Taiwanese, Southern Min is a first language for most of the Hoklo people, the main ethnicity of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is not absolute, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Southern Min while some non-Hoklo speak Southern Min fluently, there are many Southern Min speakers also among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic Chinese immigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian and brought the language to what is now Burma, Indonesia and present-day Malaysia and Singapore. In general, Southern Min from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong and speak Teochew language, the variant of Southern Min from that region. Southern Min-speakers form the majority of Chinese in Singapore, with the largest group being Hokkien, despite the similarities the two groups are rarely seen as part of the same Minnan Chinese subgroups. The variants of Southern Min spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou, the variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Those Southern Min variants that are known as Hokkien in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants. The variants of Southern Min in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are known as Teochew or Chaozhou. Teochew is of importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra. The Philippines variant is mostly from the Quanzhou area as most of their forefathers are from the aforementioned area, the Southern Min language variant spoken around Shanwei and Haifeng differs markedly from Teochew and may represent a later migration from Zhangzhou
Southern Min
–
Koa-a books, Min Nan written in Chinese characters
Southern Min
–
Distribution of Southern Min.
19.
Taiwanese Hokkien
–
Taiwanese Hokkien, commonly known as Taiwanese, is a branched-off variant of Hokkien spoken natively by about 70% of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by the Taiwanese Hoklo people, who descended from immigrants from southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty, the Pe̍h-ōe-jī romanization is a popular orthography for this variant of Hokkien. However, due to the popularity of Hokkien entertainment media from Taiwan, Taiwanese has become a prominent variety of Hokkien. Taiwanese Hokkien is a variety of Hokkien, a group of Southern Min dialects. Like many Min varieties, it has literary and colloquial layers of vocabulary. The literary layer can be traced to the late Tang dynasty, in contrast, the colloquial layers of Min varieties are believed to have branched from the mainstream of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty. Regional variations within Taiwanese may be traced back to Hokkien variants spoken in Southern Fujian, specifically those from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, Taiwanese Hokkien also contains loanwords from Japanese and the native Formosan languages. The literary form of Hokkien once flourished in Fujian and was brought to Taiwan by early emigrants, tale of the Lychee Mirror, a manuscript for a series of plays published during the Ming dynasty in 1566, is one of the earliest known works. This form of the language is now largely extinct, however, literary readings of the numbers are used in certain contexts such as reciting telephone numbers. During Yuan dynasty, Quanzhou became an international port for trade with the outside world. From that period onwards, due to political and economic reasons and this included the relatively undeveloped island of Formosa, starting around 1600. They brought with them their language, Hokkien. During the late Ming dynasty, due to chaos, there was increased migration from southern Fujian. The earliest immigrants who were involved in the development of Taiwan included pirate-merchants Chinese Peter, in 1621, Chinese Peter from Zhangzhou and his forces occupied Ponkan and started to develop Tirosen. After the death of Peter and another pirate, Li Dan of Quanzhou, by 1628, he had grown so powerful that the Ming court bestowed him the official title, Patrolling Admiral. In 1624, the number of Chinese in the island was about 25,000, during the reign of Chongzhen Emperor, there were frequent droughts in the Fujian region. Zheng and a Chinese official suggested to send victims to Taiwan, although this plan was never carried out, the Zheng family maintained an interest in Taiwan that would have dire consequences for the Dutch. In 1624 and 1626, the Dutch and Spanish forces occupied the Tainan and Keelung areas, during the 40 years of Dutch colonial rule of Taiwan, many Han Chinese from the Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Hakka regions of mainland China were recruited to help develop Taiwan
Taiwanese Hokkien
–
A selection of literary works (original and translated) in Taiwanese, in several orthographies.
Taiwanese Hokkien
–
Proportion of residents aged 6 or older using Hokkien at home in Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen & Matsu in 2010
Taiwanese Hokkien
–
An issue of the
Taiwan Church News, first published by Presbyterian missionaries in 1885. This was the first printed newspaper in Taiwan, and was written in Taiwanese, in the Latin orthography pe̍h-oē-jī.
Taiwanese Hokkien
–
The Taiwanese-Japanese Dictionary, using the orthography in kana
20.
Amoy dialect
–
It is one of the most widely researched and studied varieties of the Southern Min languages, and has historically come to be one of the more standardized varieties. Spoken Amoynese and Taiwanese are both mixtures of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou spoken dialects, as such, they are very closely aligned phonologically. However, there are subtle differences between the two, as a result of physical separation and other historical factors. The lexical differences between the two are more pronounced. Generally speaking, the Hokkien dialects of Amoy, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Taiwan, in 1842, as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, Amoy was designated as a trading port. Amoy and Kulangsu rapidly developed, which resulted in an influx of people from neighboring areas such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. The mixture of various accents formed the basis for Amoy dialect. Over the last several centuries, a number of Fujianese peoples from these same areas migrated to Taiwan during Dutch rule. Eventually, the mixture of accents spoken in Taiwan became popularly known as Taiwanese during Japanese rule, Amoy speakers also migrated to Southeast Asia. Spoken Amoy dialect preserves many of the sounds and words from Old Chinese, however, the vocabulary of Amoy was also influenced in its early stages by the languages of the ancient Minyue peoples. Spoken Amoy is known for its use of nasalization. Unlike Mandarin, Amoy dialect distinguishes between voiced and voiceless unaspirated initial consonants, unlike English, it differentiates between unaspirated and aspirated voiceless initial consonants. A comparison between Amoy and other Southern Min languages can be found there, Amoy is similar to other Southern Min variants in that it makes use of five tones, though only two in checked syllables. The tones are numbered from 1 through 8, with 4 and 8 being the checked tones. Amoy has extremely extensive tone sandhi rules, in an utterance, what an utterance is, in the context of this language, is an ongoing topic for linguistic research. For the purpose of article, an utterance may be considered a word. For example, the character for big/great, 大, has a reading of tōa. Because of the nature of the rules governing when to use a given pronunciation
Amoy dialect
–
Amoy
-i
