Chinese transliteration system8/22/2023 ![]() ![]() It is used to teach millions of Chinese school children, not only for foreigners to pronounce. And given that many sounds of Mandarin cannot be pronounced by non-native speakers, why even try to find "closer" matches (in whatever metrics you would define)? After all Pinyin was developed to map all Putonghua sounds to Roman letters in a bijective fashion. Whatever letters you chose, you could quite possibly only satisfy the pronunciation system of one language.Some sounds can probably be mapped to similar IPA notation, while others seem totally off.įrom my own reasoning I'd say there are at least two arguments that may speak for the possibly awkward choice of letters: I have never found a reasoning on how Pinyin was created, but as Alenanno says, there have been predecessors and people working on the Pinyin standard already had some experience with existing systems. So, for example, the Pinyin qīng xiāo which would be incorrectly pronounced by someone who doesn't know Pinyin, would be written ching shiao in a Relaxed Pinyin, which would allow them to pronunce Chinese in the most possibly correct way they could, without having to learn anything they don't already know. Of course, you can't go back from this to Pinyin because some letters represent more than one Piyin letter. This would be a Relaxed Pinyin which would just allow a better pronunciation of Chinese names for people that don't know Pinyin: TL DR: Sorry for the long post, but the question would be, do you know why this foreigner-confusing letters as Q, X and C were chosen for Pinyin instead of making it more readable for non-chinese speakers? So if someone who doesn't know chinese, reads "qing xin", they would pronounce "king ksin", but rather, if it was written "ching shin" they would read it right, at least the best way a non-Chinese speaker can. What I think is, Pinyin is great for Chinese learners, who need to tell apart sounds like G & K Q, CH & ZH and SH & X, but for foreign readers, a simplified Pinyin should be used. I know that if one were to choose roman letters that sound like Chinese phonemes and not repeating those letters, the roman alphabet just isn't large enough for all Chinese phonemes, but anyway, a foreign speaker shouldn't need to distinguish Q from CH and ZH, especially if they were not to learn the language, but just to pronounce some Chinese names right. This letters are obviously pronounced very different in Pinyin than in any other language, so why were they chosen? So I've heard people pronounce Chinese names wrong each and every time, when those names have letters like B, D, ZH, C, Q, X and G. But people who don't know the language being romanized will pronounce roman letters as they pronounce them in their language or in a general common pronunciation shared by romance languages and english, mainly. ![]() This has the obvious benefit that people who can (maybe only) read roman letters (a great part of the world's population) will be able to read it. A romanization system is basically a system in which roman (latin) letters are used for languages that use non-roman scripts. ![]()
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