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Chinese Transliteration
The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems. General Chinese General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese. General Chinese is not specifically a romanisation system, but two alternative systems. One uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other is an alphabetic romanisation system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Guanhua zimu ''Guanhua zimu'' 官話字母, developed by Wang Zhao 王照 (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wu Chinese
The Wu languages (; Romanization of Wu Chinese, Wu romanization and Romanization of Wu Chinese#IPA, IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] (Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Zhejiang Province, and the part of Jiangsu, Jiangsu Province south of the Yangtze River, which makes up the cultural region of Wu (region), Wu. The Suzhou dialect was the prestige dialect of Wu as of the 19th century, and formed the basis of Wu's koiné dialect, Shanghainese, at the History of Shanghai, turn of the 20th century. Speakers of various Wu languages sometimes inaccurately labelled their mother tongue as "Shanghainese" when introduced to foreigners. The languages of #subdivision, Northern Wu are mutually intelligible with each other, while those of #subdivision, Southern Wu are not. Historical linguistics, Historical linguists view Wu of great significance because it distinguished itse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northeast, and the Philippines to the south. The territories controlled by the ROC consist of 168 islands, with a combined area of . The main island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', has an area of , with mountain ranges dominating the eastern two-thirds and plains in the western third, where its highly urbanised population is concentrated. The capital, Taipei, forms along with New Taipei City and Keelung the largest metropolitan area of Taiwan. Other major cities include Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. With around 23.9 million inhabitants, Taiwan is among the most densely populated countries in the world. Taiwan has been settled for at least 25,000 years. Ancestors of Taiwanese indigenous peoples settled the isla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Minnan
Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/ Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about 70%+ of the population of Taiwan. It is spoken by a significant portion of Taiwanese people descended from immigrants of southern Fujian during the Qing dynasty. It is one of the national languages of Taiwan. Taiwanese is generally similar to spoken Amoy Hokkien, Quanzhou Hokkien, and Zhangzhou Hokkien, as well as their dialectal forms used in Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Penang Hokkien, Philippine Hokkien, Medan Hokkien, & Southern Peninsular Malaysian Hokkien. It is mutually intelligible with Amoy Hokkien and Zhangzhou Hokkien at the mouth of the Jiulong River (九龍) immediately to the west in mainland China and with Philippine Hokkien to the south, spoken altogether by about 3 million people. The mass popularity of Hokk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Kana
Taiwanese kana (, Pe̍h-ōe-jī : "tâi oân gí ká biêng", IPA : ) is a katakana-based writing system that was used to write Taiwanese Hokkien (commonly called "Taiwanese") when the island of Taiwan was under Japanese rule. It functioned as a phonetic guide to hanzi, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhuyin fuhao in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages. The system was imposed by Japan at the time and used in a few dictionaries, as well as textbooks. The Taiwanese-Japanese Dictionary, published in 1931–32, is an example. It uses various signs and diacritics to identify sounds that do not exist in Japanese. The system is chiefly based on the Amoy dialect of Hokkien. Through the system, the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan aimed to help Taiwanese people learn the Japanese language, as well as help Japanese people learn the Taiwanese language. Linguistically speaking, however, the syllabary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the other modern European languages. With modifications, it is also used for other alphabets, such as the Vietnamese alphabet. Its modern repertoire is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Etymology The term ''Latin alphabet'' may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet. These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ruby Character
Ruby characters or rubi characters () are small, annotative gloss (annotation), glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logogram, logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Sinitic languages, Chinese Chinese characters, ''hanzi'', Japonic languages, Japanese ''kanji'', and Korean language, Korean ''hanja'', to show the logographs' pronunciation; these were formerly also used for Vietnamese language, Vietnamese ''hán tự'' and ''chữ nôm'', and may still occasionally be seen in that context when reading archaic texts. Typically called just ruby or rubi, such annotations are most commonly used as pronunciation guides for characters that are likely to be unfamiliar to the reader. Examples Here is an example of Japanese ruby characters (called ''furigana'') for Tokyo (""): Most are written with the ''hiragana'' syllabary, but ''katakana'' and ''romaji'' are also occasionally used. Alternatively, sometimes foreign words (usu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bopomofo
Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe other varieties of Chinese, particularly other varieties of Mandarin Chinese dialects, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien. Consisting of 37 characters and five tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Bopomofo was first introduced in China by the Republican government in the 1910s and was used alongside the Wade–Giles system for romanization purposes, which used a modified Latin alphabet. Today, Bopomofo is now more common in Taiwan than on the Chinese mainland, and is after Hanyu Pinyin used as a secondary electronic input method for writing Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan as well as in dictionaries or other non-official documents. Etymology Bopomofo is the name used by the ISO and Unicode. ''Zhuyin'' () literally means phon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhang Binglin
Zhang Binglin (January 12, 1869 – June 14, 1936), also known by his art name Zhang Taiyan, was a Chinese philologist, textual critic, philosopher, and revolutionary. His philological works include ''Wen Shi'' (文始 "The Origin of Writing"), the first systematic work of Chinese etymology. He also made contributions to historical Chinese phonology, proposing that "the ''niang'' (娘) and ''ri'' (日) initials n Middle Chinese">Middle_Chinese.html" ;"title="n Middle Chinese">n Middle Chinesecome from the ''ni'' (泥) initial [in Old Chinese]" (known as ''niang ri gui ni'' 娘日歸泥). He developed a system of shorthand based on the seal script, called ''jiyin zimu'' (記音字母), later adopted as the basis of zhuyin. Though innovative in many ways, he was skeptical of new archaeological findings, regarding the oracle bones as forgery. An activist as well as a scholar, he produced many political works. Because of his outspoken character, he was jailed for three years by the Q ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commission On The Unification Of Pronunciation
The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation () was the organization established by the Beiyang government in 1912 to select ancillary Phonetic transcription, phonetic symbols for Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin (resulting in the creation of Zhuyin) and set the standard Standard Chinese, Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters. History It was decided in a draft on 7 August 1912, a month after a conference led by the Cai Yuanpei on July 10, that a set of phonetic symbols were to be used for education purposes. The Commission was set up in December, led by Wu Zhihui (Woo Tsin-hang; ). The Commission ended on 22 May 1913. A later similar organization that still exists that had been headed by Wu Zhihui for a while is the Mandarin Promotion Council. Members The first meeting took place on 15 February 1913 in Beijing, with 44 delegates. The chairman was Wu; vice-chairman Wang Zhao (linguist), Wang Zhao (). There were two representatives per each of the 26 Chinese province, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lu Zhuangzhang
Lu Zhuangzhang (盧戇章, 1854–1928) was the first Chinese scholar to develop a system for the romanization of Chinese, the ''Qieyin Xinzi'' (切音新字 "New Phonetic Alphabet") in 1892, which stimulated Chinese interest in script reform from inefficient Chinese characters to basic alphabetic spelling. Lu was an influential and prolific Chinese language reformer in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and early Republic of China (1912–49). Lu was born in Fujian Province on the southeast coast of China and was raised in Xiamen (historically called Amoy) where Christian missionaries had introduced a romanization of the local variety of Chinese that was widely used in newspapers and books. When he was 18, Lu Zhuangzhang failed the imperial examination for the civil service, and he subsequently converted to Christianity and sought out opportunities in the missionary community. In 1875, at the age of 21, Lu moved to Singapore where he intensively studied English. After returning ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Woo Tsin-hang
Wu Jingheng (), commonly known by his courtesy name Wu Zhihui (Woo Chih-hui, ; 1865–1953), also known as Wu Shi-Fee, was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation that created Zhuyin (based on Zhang Binglin's work) and standardized Guoyu pronunciation. Wu became an anarchist during his stay in France in the first decade of the 20th century, along with Li Shizeng, Zhang Renjie, and Cai Yuanpei. With them, he was known as one of the strongly anti-communist "Four Elders" of the Nationalist Party in the 1920s. Career Born into a poor family in Wujin, Jiangsu province as Wu Tiao (), Wu Zhihui was an outstanding student, passing the challenging Juren examination in 1891. He served at the Nanyang College Preparatory School Hall (now the Shanghai Nanyang Model High School). In 1903 in the '' Subao'' newspaper, Wu criticized the Qing government and derided then ruling Empress Dowager Cixi as a "wither ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
