The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, commonly called Hanyu Pinyin or simply pinyin (pīnyīn), is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. Hanyu literally means — that is, the Chinese language — while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanization system used in China, Singapore and the United Nations. Its use has become the standard method for transliterating Standard Chinese in most regions, though it is less commonly used in Taiwan. It is employed to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students in mainland China and Singapore. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries.
In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant). Diacritics are used to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts.
Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei and, particularly, Zhou Youguang, who has been called the "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlier romanization systems. The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since. The International Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin as ISO 7098 in 1982, and the United Nations began using it in 1986. Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as its official romanization system in 2009, replacing Tongyong Pinyin.
History
Background Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitled Xizi Qiji (Hsi-tzŭ Ch'i-chi; ) and published in Beijing in 1605. Twenty years later, fellow Jesuit Nicolas Trigault published in Hangzhou. Neither book had any influence among the contemporary Chinese literati, and the romanizations they introduced primarily were useful for Westerners.
During the late Qing, the reformer Song Shu (1862–1910) proposed that China adopt a phonetic writing system. A student of the scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had observed the effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning during his visits to Japan. While Song did not himself propose a transliteration system for Chinese, his discussion ultimately led to a proliferation of proposed schemes. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and further improved by Herbert Giles, presented in Chinese–English Dictionary (1892). It was popular, and was used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. In 1943, the US military tapped Yale University to develop another romanization system for Mandarin Chinese intended for pilots flying over China—much more than previous systems, the result appears very similar to modern Hanyu Pinyin.
Development Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei, as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by profession, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin", Reprinted in part as worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the People's Republic was established. Earlier attempts to romanize Chinese writing were mostly abandoned in 1944. Zhou became an economics professor in Shanghai, and when the Ministry of Education created the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language in 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned him the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he was not a linguist by trade.
Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), Latinxua Sin Wenz (1931), and the diacritics from bopomofo (1918). "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect."
An initial draft was authored in January 1956 by Ye Laishi, Lu Zhiwei and Zhou Youguang. A revised Pinyin scheme was proposed by Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei and Li Jinxi, and became the main focus of discussion among the group of Chinese linguists in June 1956, forming the basis of Pinyin standard later after incorporating a wide range of feedback and further revisions. The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and officially adopted at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on 11 February 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults.
Despite its formal promulgation, pinyin did not become widely used until after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, students were trained in pinyin from an early age, learning it in tandem with characters or even before.
During the height of the Cold War the use of pinyin system over Wade–Giles and Yale romanizations outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the mainland Chinese government. Beginning in the early 1980s, Western publications addressing mainland China began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems; this change followed the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the United States and China in 1979. In 2001, the Chinese government issued the National Common Language Law, providing a legal basis for applying pinyin. The current specification of the orthography is GB/T 16159–2012.
Syllables Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of initials () and finals (). This is distinct from the concept of consonant and vowel sounds as basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Chinese language). Every syllable in Standard Chinese can be described as a pair of one initial and one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known as erhua). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications.
While initials are usually a single consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals (), i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials and are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce , officially pronounced , as and , officially pronounced , as or . Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below.
Initials The conventional lexicographical order derived from Bopomofo is: b p m f d t n l g k h j q x zh ch sh r z c s
In each cell below, the pinyin letters assigned to each initial are accompanied by their phonetic realizations in brackets, notated according to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
colspan="2" Labial Alveolar Retroflex Alveolo-palatal Velar Plosive unaspirated b d g aspirated p t k Nasal m n Affricate unaspirated z zh j aspirated c ch q Fricative f s sh x h Liquid l r ~ Semivowel y , yu and w
Pinyin IPA Description b Unaspirated p, like in English spark. p Strongly aspirated p, like in English pay. m Like the m in English may. f Like the f in English fair. d Unaspirated t, like in English stop. t Strongly aspirated t, like in English take. n Like the n in English nay. l ~ Varies between the l in English lay and tt in American English better. g Unaspirated k, like in English skill. k Strongly aspirated k, like in English kiss. h ~ Varies between the h in English hat, and the ch in Scottish English loch. j Alveolo-palatal, unaspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the ch in English churchyard. q Alveolo-palatal, aspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the ch in English punchy. x Alveolo-palatal, unaspirated. No direct equivalent in English, but similar to the sh in English push. zh ~ Retroflex, unaspirated. Like j in English jack. ch ~ Retroflex, aspirated. Varies between the ch in English church and sh in English bushy. sh ~ Retroflex, unaspirated. Like sh in shirt. r [~]~ Retroflex. No direct equivalent in English, but varies between the r in English reduce and the s in English measure. z Unaspirated. Like the zz in English pizza. c Aspirated. Like the ts in English bats. s Like the s in English say. w Like the w in English water. y Like the y in English yes.yuLike the hu in French huit, see below.
Finals In each cell below, the first line indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.
The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n, -ng, and -r, the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese, reflecting final consonants in Old Chinese), or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones. ∅ -e-o-ê -a -ei -ai -ou -ao -en -an-ong -eng -ang er ∅ colspan="2" () rowspan="3" () colspan="2" () colspan="5" colspan="4" Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê () and syllabic nasals m (, ), n (, ), ng (, ) are used as interjections or in neologisms; for example, pinyin defines the names of several pinyin letters using -ê finals.
According to the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, ng can be abbreviated with the shorthand ŋ. However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering it on computers.
Pinyin IPA Form with zero initial Explanation -i [~], [~] -i is a buzzed continuation of the consonant following z-, c-, s-, zh-, ch-, sh- or r-. In all other cases, -i has the sound of bee. a a like English father, but a bit more fronted e , e a back, unrounded vowel (similar to English duh, but not as open). Pronounced as a sequence . ai ai like English eye, but a bit lighter ei ei as in hey ao ao approximately as in cow; the a is much more audible than the o ou ou as in North American English so an an like British English ban, but more central en en as in taken ang ang as in German Angst.