Talk:Pinyin/Archive 3

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Names of Pinyin letters in Chinese?

Can someone give a link on this, please? Interested both in romanisation and in Chinese characters, if exists. 诶 (ei) for A, a? --Anatoli (talk) 05:38, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for being 2 years late... According to the 10th Edition of Xinhua Zidian (paperback), the standard official rendering for the English Latin alphabet (e.g. for teaching purposes) is represented in Bopomofo. The Xinhua Zidian has the following list in its appendix:

• A ㄚ
• B ㄅㄝ
• C ㄘㄝ
• D ㄉㄝ
• E ㄜ
• F ㄝㄈ
• G ㄍㄝ
• H ㄏㄚ
• I ㄧ
• J ㄐㄧㄝ
• K ㄎㄝ
• L ㄝㄌ
• M ㄝㄇ
• N ㄋㄝ
• O ㄛ
• P ㄆㄝ
• Q ㄑㄧㄡ
• R ㄚㄦ
• S ㄝㄙ
• T ㄊㄝ
• U ㄨ
• V ㄪㄝ (note that ㄪ(万) v is not Standard Mandarin)
• W ㄨㄚ
• X ㄒㄧ
• Y ㄧㄚ
• Z ㄗㄝ

Strictly speaking, "ABCDEFG" is not pronounced "aye bee see dee ee ef gee" in Chinese like in English, but rather "a beh tseh deh ee ef geh" (this is used in primary school to teach children the alphabet. also note that my romanizations are not Hanyu Pinyin). Note that this rule does not apply when teaching English, Mathematics (i.e. algebra), Chemistry (i.e. in formulas), Physics and the like, nor in acronyms (such as NBA); this only applies to usage within teaching the Chinese language itself. I hope that helps. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 02:58, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Do names of the Roman letters exist in mainland China as well? Please advise here if you answer: Atitarev@English Wiktionary. --Anatoli (talk) 10:03, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Xi

Xi is much better pronounced as See rather than She for English speakers. This is my personal opinion. --刻意(Kèyì) 13:37, 16 December 2010 (UTC) I just had this issue w/ a student in class today. She wanted to pronounce xiong [song] whereas I think general consensus is more like [shyong]. user:jfortier May 2011 —Preceding undated comment added 20:53, 25 May 2011 (UTC).

Tone marks - Not widely used / Now widely used

The graphic near the start of the article shows some chinese characters and pinyin without tone marks. The caption underneath claims "it does not contain tonal marks whose input method is not widely used". Surely this should read "now widely used"? Are tone marks becoming more common, or are they not common ? Thanks in advance - Graham / Wwkudu|wwkudu 06:37, 18 February 2011‎ (UTC)

The section "Initials and finals"

I believe there is some confusion in the section Initials and finals:

(1) The first paragraph of the section says "Nearly each Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except in the special syllable er and when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable." This seems to imply that a medial (e.g., i in ia), counts as the first part of a final. But the chart in the sub-section "Finals" treats them as distinct, as does the subsequent sentence "Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials...." This needs to be made consistent.

(2) It's not clear what each element of the first column (labeled "Nucleus") of the table of finals refers to notationally: Is it a pinyin letter? (No, because the schwa appears in the column.) Is it an IPA symbol? (No, because the entry labeled a leads to three different IPA pronunciations: ɑ, a, and ɛ.)

Can someone put in clarifications? Thanks.Duoduoduo (talk) 17:21, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

I see that these questions are answered in Standard Chinese phonology#Vowels and Standard Chinese phonology#Syllables. I'll put clarifications into this article based on that. Duoduoduo (talk) 22:37, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Pinyin for transcribing minority languages

I have failed to locate information on wikipedia on the modified version of pinyin that is in general use to transcribe or write (in the absence of other scripts) the various minority languages of China. These officially designated scripts are based on the sounds included in Hanyu pinyin, but have certain more or less standardized extensions to accomodate for the often more complex phonological systems of these langugages (such as doubling the letters representing the voiced stops and affricates, since the simple letters in Hanyu pinyin represent voiceless unaspirates not voiced phonemes, etc.)

Is this failure one of my poor search skills, or is this info simply missing? If missing, is it material for an article of its own, or better treated as a section in this article? --Sannab 12:58, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

There are two different issues involved, I guess. One is full writing systems for minority languages such as Zhuang, Bai, Miao and Yao (Mien); the other is the transcription of words (e.g. personal and place names) from minority languages that have their own non-Latin scripts, such as Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian. There are some articles on Wikipedia that describe the former types, and there is an article for the official Tibetan transcription.

Uyghur used to be written in a modified Latin alphabet, but has reverted to Persian-Arabic script. Ostensibly there is a system for Uyghur personal and place names, but it is not really used, e.g. Kashgar (Uyghur: قەشقەر/K̢ǝxk̢ǝr) according to the transcription scheme should be spelled "Käxkär" or "Kaxkar", but the official spelling is in fact "Kaxgar". The same is true for Mongolian.

One problem is that the rules are not very clear. When Chinese texts are transcribed in Pinyin, foreign names should officially be converted to the original spelling (e.g. "Washington", not "Huáshèngdùn"), but it has not been defined how names from languages not written with the Latin alphabet are supposed to be transcribed or transliterated (e.g. "Khrushchev", "Hruščev", etc.; definitely neither "Hèlǔxiǎofū" nor "Хрущев"). —Babelfisch 05:38, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Kashgar is transcribed K̂äxk̂är in strict SASM/GNC and Kaxgar or even Kexger, Kexker in broad SASM/GNC. You are welcomed to talk this on Talk:SASM/GNC romanization. I'm confused with this phenominen, too. ––虞海 (Yú Hǎi) ✍ 09:27, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, I was primarily thinking of full writing systems; where it is clearly so that a set of principles based on pinyin, but with a set of extensions added to cover more complicated phonological systems than that of Chinese, is used. I will admit that my knowledge of this derives almost solely from studying Tibetoburman languages, and that my understanding that it is applicable to other language groups is based of unverified hearsay.

If you have learnt the system for one language, you have a pretty good shot of understanding that of another. I think this set of extensions should be documented. It includes the treatment of voiced/voiceless unaspirated/voiceless aspirate (f ex bb/b/p respectively), where Chinese only has the latter two, but many minority languages (a least within the Tibetoburman branch) has three, or even four (a prenasalised fourth series , commonly "pinyinized" to 'mb'; it includes the treatment of tone, where the accentual principles of Chinese pinyin have been set aside, and replaced with final consonants (since the combination of syllabic tone with a wide range of final consonants afaik is pretty rare, tonal languages mostly are restricted to final nasals), often with a visual cue in choice of consonant (f ex -t (which rises above the line) for high tone, and -p for low) These are the things that rose to the top of my mind, and they are admittedly very biased towards the Tibetoburman languages.

This is imo a separate issue from the transcription of Chinese into pinyin or the transcription of loans from minority languages within a Chinese language context. I am primarily wondering if this should be documented within the article on pinyin (then presumable under Other languages, or if it better treated as a separate article.--Sannab 08:24, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Pinyin was never generally used as place name transciption in China until 1978

Pinyin was never generally used as place name transciption in China until 1978, when the State Council of the People's Republic of China approve and forward the 《关于改用汉语拼音方案作为我国人名地名罗马字母拼写法的统一规范的报告》 (written in Aug. 30, 1978) in Sept. 16, 1978.

From 1958 to 1978, traditional conventions were still generally used.

Take an example, Kwangtung (Canton) will appear in altas and other publications in China. Few publication use Guangdong.

Espcially after 1975, when the State Council put the 《关于推迟实行人名地名改用汉语拼音的通知》, pinyin is rarely used.

So the box information -

Preceded by
Gwoyeu Romatzyh 	Official romanization adopted
by the People's Republic of China
1958- 	Succeeded by
current

is totally wrong. ––虞海 (Yú Hǎi) ✍ 09:29, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

/ɑ/ should be /a/ in several places

i can't be bothered to edit the entire text though so you people do it. it's not standard to say /tɑ/ for 'he, she, it'.

Can someone verify please.. I am getting a lot of contradictory definitions of pinyin a. My schoolbook says it is central, the Chinese_vowel_diagram shows it as a front /a/, this article (pinyin) has it as a back /ɑ/. Trideceth12 (talk) 03:18, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I recently revised my own transliteration table (http://www.china-learn.info/FaYinFiles/IPA_NPA_4.html) by checking against the IPA site that has recordings (in two different voices) for all the vowels and consonants that have been given IPA symbols. I disagree with several of the "a" values given in the article here, and there are a few other places where I have to disagree. One of the problems, of course, is that native speakers of Chinese have a range of sounds. Mandarin speakers from the Shanghai area say "chi fan" whereas standard Mandarin speakers say "chi fɑn." But the IPA site (cited on my webpage) uses speakers with a different IPA dialect. I find that the second one produces sounds that are closer to Mandarin, at least most of the time. So it's possible that a speaker of IPA dialect 1 would code some sounds in Chinese in ways that I would not accept. There is always a problem with symbols I guess.P0M (talk) 07:02, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Citation requested

Someone has requested that a citation be provided for the part of the Chart of comparison with other Romanizations where the IPA for ㄦ is listed as ɑɻ -- probably because there are two pronunciations, one being ɑɻ and the other being eɻ. It is possible to hear the 兒 of 兒子 pronounced as ɑɻ, but much more common to hear eɻ. And, as far as I know, 2 is always pronounced ɑɻ. 這兒 can be heard both ways too. I don't think a citation is needed for this information. If somebody wants to track it down, it's probably in Y.R. Chao's Chinese grammar book. What may be needed is an explanation somewhere. It's rather like the two ways heard for words such as 劉. P0M (talk) 08:45, 26 January 2012 (UTC) Someone also has a problem with fəŋ as a representation of 馮, possibly because pinyin give it as "feng" but "eng" does not sound like the "eng" of Engles. 馮友蘭 wrote spelled his name "Fung," which gets the right idea across to the average English reader. In other words, fəŋ is the way I would write it in IPA.P0M (talk) 09:03, 26 January 2012 (UTC)

Bo, po, mo, fo, chi, ci

According to this article, "o" after a labial is pronounced as a diphthong, which contradicts both Pinyin table & the sites linked to there, according to which it should be a monophthong (like pinyin "o!"). Another thing (no sources here, but maybe someone can share his own ones) is the pronunciation of "c" & "ch" before a null final -- auditorily, they sound more like "z"+"s" & "zh"+"sh" respectively than like aspirated counterparts of "z" & "zh" (aspiration seems to be hardly pronounceable in this environment). 31.6.141.51 (talk) 23:22, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

The "bo" sound (as a non-diphthong) is highly unusual, as far as I know. There are only four hanzi in ordinary-sized dictionaries that are pronounced ㄛ and they are all interjections indicating some kind of emotional reaction, doubt, surprise, etc. There are lots of words that use it after an initial consonant, so nobody actually has any problem making the sound. However, many people may have difficulty making it in isolation and substitute the diphthong. It is similar to the problem many English speakers have in making an isolated ㄝ sound even though it occurs in English in words like "sled." Just don't make the mistake of pronouncing "bóbo" like "bóubou."

I don't understand your point about "c" and "ch." Both of them are formed by beginning with the tongue being firmly against the top of the mouth (in different places, of course), and then they are blown out of the way. Z, c, s are similar as to the where the tip of the tongue is in the mouth. Z has the tongue firmly closing off the flow of air and then it is relaxed and scraped down across the back of the front teeth, c is the one that gets blown away, and s begins with the air flow narrowly restricted but not actually closed following which the channel is widened a little. The same sequence follows for zh (the tongue touches and is then relaxed and withdrawn smoothly), ch has the breath pent up and the the tongue is blown out of the way, sh makes a narrow channel for air to flow through and then the channel is widened, and then r is made with the beginning gap the side of the ending gap for the other three—in other words there is no pent-up-ness followed by some kind of release.

If by aspiration you mean "strong burst of air," then I would say that c and ch are definitely aspirated. The c is like the "ts" in "its," and the ch is like the "ch" in "chart" except that the later is not retroflex, so to get the Chinese ch sound the tip of the tongue has to go back to the region where the ridge that runs along the top of the mouth from front center ends. (That might be a little exaggerated, but retroflex really does mean that the speaker curls the tongue way back.) Many speakers of Mandarin from southern areas do not make the retroflex sounds. Zh becomes z, ch become c, and sh becomes s. P0M (talk) 07:49, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

"earlier versions" unclear sentence

Article says "The system was developed from earlier versions by Zhou Youguang (b. 1906), who led ..."

Makes it sound like the earlier versions were by him. It actually means the development was by him, and the earlier versions were by someone else? Tim Zukas (talk) 21:25, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Why does the text claim no distinction between z and c?

I cannot understand the writing in the section that says:

Z and c also have that distinction; however, they are pronounced as [ts], as in German and Italian, which do not have that distinction.

Maybe the problem is with whatever is meant by "that distinction" having gotten lost in the mix somewhere.

"z" has the sound [ts] and "c" has the sound [tsʰ]. If you want to say that [ts] is an unaspirated [tsʰ], then just say so. By the time the reader has been dragged through European languages that do or do not have distinction between certain aspirated or unaspirated, or voiced or unvoiced, consonants, the point of what the article is trying to say will have been lost -- especially for those who do not speak French, German, and maybe a couple other European languages.P0M (talk) 02:08, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

I see that my change was reverted before the ink was dry. There are serious problems with the writing of this article. Maybe we need to revise the article so that the English is clear enough that we can tell whether something is either right or wrong.

I note that what is given as [ts] in the paragraph I just changed and had reverted is later written as [tɕ] and matched with [tɕʰ] in a chart not far below.

The edit summary for the revert says: "but German and Italian don't have [tsʰ], so maybe the broader transcription is better)", but I have no clear idea of what this collection of words means or why the reader will be aided by mention of the lack of a parallel in languages s/he may not know anyway.

At the beginning of the paragraph I thought that the paragraph was going to be about the ways in which the romanization of Chinese fails to be adequate to the Chinese language -- in ways analogous to ways that Latin alphabet spellings are not adequate to the various languages they are used to spell. But that is not how the paragraph ends up.

The text claims that "the correspondence between the Roman letter and the [Chinese] sound is sometimes idiosyncratic"—which sounds like a slam on the creators of the system. What it amounts to is complaining that the Chinese system uses some letters or combinations of letters in ways that will make the unprepared speaker of English to use his/her ordinary decoding skills and get wrong answers. "Q" is one instance of how Chinese spelling is likely to be confusing to English-speaking learners. But give the Chinese founders of their system credit for knowing that Albanian "q" is pronounced something like Chinese "q," that "x" is pronounced something like "sh" in Portugese, and leaving "j" alone so that "zh" has the "strangeness" of sounding like "j" whereas "ch" and "sh" sound reasonable to the English-trained ear, and thereby manage to give the learner of the system another kind of grip on "zh." It's a pretty rational use of letters and combinations of letters to represented sounds according to a formal convention. Another convention might have been chosen, but it would have been one without such good hints to the linguistically broadened speakers of English.

I do not think there is anything "idiosyncratic" about the Chinese system, at least not at this point. The idiosyncratic parts come in when they try to use their system like a real alphabet in the sense that the same spelling gets pronounced different ways in different contexts, and when they get cute and try to save on printer's ink by spelling "huei" as "hui" and make other such "simplifications."P0M (talk) 03:03, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Alternative writing used (informally)

Maybe adding the alternative writing can be useful as the example below:

Sometimes, if marking the tone using `´etc. is not possible, the tones can be represented by numbers: wei4 shen2 me0 ni3 mei2 lai2 ne0. It is mostly used in digital dictionaries etc. but it is unofficial.

That's right, but leave out the numbers. (wei shen me ni mei lai ne?) Can you now still identify what the sentence means? The answer is yes. Adding numbers is much more work. Perhaps it helps learners, but native Chinese people don't need that.--89.14.118.189 (talk) 23:42, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

A non-sentence? Structure and meaning

The current text has the following sentence:

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters – initials (simplified Chinese: 声母; traditional Chinese: 聲母; pinyin: shēngmǔ) and finals (simplified Chinese: 韵母; traditional Chinese: 韻母; pinyin: yùnmǔ) – and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language).

It is so long that the structure has become confusing. Let's start by removing the long interior comment delimited by m-dashes:

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language).

Further, let's isolate another comment now not correctly punctuated anyway:

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters (and not consonant and vowel letters) form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language).

To further expose the basic structure of the sentence, let's remove both parenthetical elements:

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters form the fundamental elements in pinyin .

As somebody who taught Chinese for over 40 years, I cannot quite understand what any of these sentences is trying to express. I suggest, therefore, that the average well-informed reader may also become confused.

Looking back to the sentence in its original form, the main idea the author was trying to get at seems to be that, historically, the pronunciation of each Chinese character could be analyzed into an initial and a final, the zhuyin fuhao system gave us symbols for initials for initials, medials, and finals, and so discussion of the pinyin spelling system has also followed this scheme. For instance, something like 追 was written ㄓㄨㄟ in zhuyin fuhao, and (breaking it down into "clusters") zh + u + (e) i. As far as I know, nobody claims that these clusters and their components are not either consonants or vowels, 字音 or 母音, nor does anybody claim that initials and finals cannot be further broken into letters.

The real issues are, instead, what combinations of letters are used to represent what phonemes. "Zh," "ch," and "sh" are "spellings" (i.e., conventional assemblages of letters) to represent particular sounds that one could not easily guess by pronouncing the nominal values of the letters in rapid sequence. "Ui" gives us no reason to expect what might more rationally (if less economically) be written as "uei." The value of "y" in "yin" is not the same as the value of "y" in "yang" (the first beginning with a vowel sound and the second with a consonant sound), etc.

What should be a simple observation (that some Chinese systems, including pinyin, break syllables into initials and finals) has metastasized into a pretty intense linguistics discussion. P0M (talk) 10:57, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

The opinion of a native speaker in response to certain other discussions

IPA (refers to 'Inconsistent use of voiced vs. unvoiced consonants in table', supports Vorlon)

I cannot understand why b, d and g in Pinyin sound like p, t and k to you. Of course, Americans have the flap t, which rather sounds like a d. However, your examples for b, d and g are spit, stop and skill. There is always an s, which changes the sounds of p, t and k. Now try to pronounce sbit, sdop and sgill. Do you see any huge difference between sp/sb, st/sd, sk/sg? That's the difference between English and Chinese b, d, g: very small. Chinese may be more aspirated in general, but don't exaggerate when describing. Therefore I suggest more precise IPA's for b, d and g. [p], [t], [k] are wrong. The Germans did better in their article: [b̥], [d̥], [ɡ̊]. Also, take a look on their z: It's [d̥z̥] and not [ts]. The English alphabet is not phonetic in comparison to the ones of e.g. Romance languages. That means the pronounciation of letters depends much on the position, especially English vowels. So it's difficult for English speakers to describe a sound of an foreign language with English equivalents. Italian z has two different pronunciations (but nonetheless a phonetic language, hard to explain why): One resembles Chinese c, the other one resembles Chinese z. Now, what's the difference? Say "hats" [ts] and then "friends" [dz]. Pay attention to the last sound. Remember that the pronunciation of plural s depends on the preceding sound. So the example "cats" [ts] for z is wrong. "Suds" is just right and not "under-aspirated". Same thing as b, d, g above. If you focus on aspiration too much, then there will be no equivalents any more. Just let Chinese b, d, g be also English b, d, g. Aspiration makes minimal difference in this case.--89.14.118.189 (talk) 23:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

The use of IPA to say anything about Chinese is rather problematical to begin with. IPA is, like any conceptual construct, a matter of 實之賓。 You have "the real thing" and then you have whatever constructs parasitize it. The "b" argument is a case in point. In Wade-Giles romanization, they distinguished between 標 and 票 by spelling one piao and the other p'iao. (It's a "rough breathing mark" and not an apostrophe that I want here. I'm not sure how to get that one on my keyboard.) I'm subjectively sure that my pronunciation of the "b" in English "bay" is not significantly different from my Mandarin teacher's pronunciation of whatever is the initial consonant in 被. I thought I knew what an unvoiced initial was supposed to be — until my teacher for Taiwanese pointed out that I was actually saying "mbay" instead of "bay." That is, my "b" sounds are all slightly vocalized. So for Taiwanese I needed to distinguish among "mbei," "bei," and "pei." (I suppose there is something like "mpei" in some language, as well as "click-pei" in San.) If I remember correctly, I was always in danger of getting boys and girls, rice and the end-product of rice consumption, confused if I did not manage to unvoice and voice things properly.

I spent quite a long time with on-line IPA software that gives readings by two speakers for many of the IPA symbols. I discovered that what one speaker said would sometimes make me think that one IPA symbol was closer than the other, but that the second speaker confounded my original decision. On b,d, and g, the recordings are of no help to me. http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/phonlab/ipatut/index.html

I am also aware that if I pick my Mandarin informants correctly, I can get quite a range of IPA possibilities depending on which informant I might choose. In a lot of these things we are talking about ranges of acceptable pronunciation.

I forgot where I saw the definition of the symbols used in the German version (the circles under the letters). I think these must indicate "unvoiced" versions.

Yes. See: http://dylansung.tripod.com/sapienti/phon/ipasymb.htm

What to say for the average well-informed reader and speaker of English is not at all clear. Tell a Bronx native that the "t" in 他 is like like the "t" in "anecdotal" will possibly produce a very strange result in Chinese. So you have to pick your audience. (Explaining ji, qi, xi to people from New Jersey was never a problem, but always a problem for students from almost anywhere else.)

So let's see, the initial consonant of 北 is lightly voiced but not aspirated. The initial consonant in 配 is (presumably) unvoiced but aspirated. The initial consonant in 得 is lightly voiced but not aspirated, 兔 is (presumably) unvoiced but aspirated. The initial consonant in 給 is lightly voiced but not aspirated. The initial consonant in 可 is (presumably) unvoiced but aspirated. Does that sound right? I'm trying to remember whether I had to watch for vocalization in sounds other than what would be a "b" in English when I was trying to learn Taiwanese. It seems to me that I must vocalize "g" in English to make it sound at all right, and probably I vocalize the "z" in English too. The trouble I have with some of these sounds is making them without having the vocalized vowel sound follow them so closely that they don't become indistinguishable.

One other complication that I think probably has not been noted. My Mandarin teacher insisted that my "d" and "t" sounds were not truly dental whereas her "d" and "t" sounds and all proper Mandarin "d" and "t" sounds were made with the tip of the tongue on the teeth, not behind the teeth and out of contact with them. P0M (talk) 13:26, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that when something is vocalized in Taiwanese, the vocalization clearly precedes the "b" or whatever. If somebody were to vocalize English speech sounds in that exaggerated way it would really stand out as a strange regional characteristic or maybe as a speech defect. In a language that distinguishes between vocalized and unvocalized initial consonants, it makes sense to avoid a middle-ground consonant sound such as the English closest equivalent.P0M (talk) 18:39, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to start changing some things, as discussed above. I hope that this time when I make changes they will not be summarily reverted without discussion. P0M (talk) 20:08, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

footnote 6

The website linked by footnote 6 is a fine one, but the footnote does not link to any specific place in an extremely large website. The discussion in the text is poor, and the footnote does not improve matters because it does not support the text.

拼 is defined by the 國語辭典 (http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/)as: 將零星的事物綴合，使相連屬。如：「拼版」、「拼圖」、「東拼西湊」。 "To combine or link together originally independent elements."

拼音 means to link together (symbols for) sounds. It means, approximately, "to spell" or "to use alphabetic letters to transcribe the sounds of a language." Adding "sounds" as in the article's "to spell sounds" is syntactically puzzling. Perhaps the author meant, "to spell out sounds." But "Pinyin means to use alphabetic letters to transcribe the sounds of Chinese or some other language," would be much clearer.P0M (talk) 11:45, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

"Pinyin" is probably an attempt to translate "to spell" into understandable Chinese, so we are probably tunneling into the tip of a bull's horn to try to translate it back into English on the basis of the Chinese component words. There are alphabet systems, which use combinations of letters to produce sound that do not relate to the sounds of their letters (e.g., ph as in "phone"), and there are syllabic systems for which every syllable that can be spoken in the language has a different symbol. Japanese uses kana for syllabic representation. Chinese uses zhuyin fuhao and pinyin to spell out sounds.P0M (talk) 19:01, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

needs chinese example words to hear the sounds with audio files and the Chinese word written in Chinese writing

The English explanations of the sounds are excellent, I just want to add more. My girlfriend is Chinese and I would like to tell her to say [Chinese word that exemplifies a difficult sound], if you know what I mean. I would like to be able to paste the Chinese language example word into Skype. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.53.148.45 (talk) 13:17, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Why Skype? And where would you get a file, or a copy of a digitized sound, to paste into Skype? I don't know anything about Skype, but it seems to me doubtful that you could paste something into a phone call. You could play a recorded sound on the computer and pipe it into Skype, providing that the software designers have provided a way to accomplish that task, or you could just speak into Skype's normal input.

There are already some good sources for recordings of difficult sounds. One of the problems is that there are some rather poor sources for recordings of difficult sounds. The recording may be technically adequate, but the speaker may not have a standard pronunciation. (But most people think their way of talking is normal. It's always the other person who has an accent.)

Anyway, the task of this article is to describe the pinyin system, and part of that description involves how the pinyin representations of sounds are to be mapped onto sounds in the real world. In other words, how should the reader contrive to produce the correct sound when presented with a romanization. In my experience as a teacher, it is more productive to tell people exactly what to do with their tongues and the other parts of their mouths than to flood them with lots of linguistics terms that are meaningless to them, or to provide them with IPA symbols that refer to sounds that do not occur in English, e.g. [ɕ][tɕ][tɕʰ][ɻ][ʂʰ], etc. The other thing that is needed is a native speaker who (unlike Liza Dolittle) knows as a native speaker exactly how to make the standard sound. P0M (talk) 18:52, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Inconsistent use of voiced vs. unvoiced consonants in table

In the table of "Pronunciation of initials", there is significant inconsistency between the IPA representations of consonants and their English approximations. Several pinyin characters (b, d, g) are given IPA mappings to voiceless consonants ([p], [t], [k]), whereas the English approximations are clearly using voiced consonants (bar, dog, god). Can someone who knows what the correct pronunciations are please clean this up? I believe the correct pronunciations are the voiced ones (IPA: [b], [d], [g]), but I'm no expert. I suspect this confusion also applies to the affricates, but I'm much less certain what the correct pronunciations here are: possibly [dz] for [ts], [dʐ] for [tʂ], and [dʑ] for [tɕ]? Vorlon 05:46 21 July 2012 (UTC)

The IPA listings are correct. In pinyin the letters (b, d, g) and (p, t, k) are all pronounced voiceless. The difference is that (p, t, k) are aspirated, and (b, d, g) are not. Mandarin Chinese does not have voiced plosives. Therefore, the contrast between b and p is only aspiration. In English the contrast between them is both aspiration and voicing. I suppose the examples are given because a native English speaker would always aspirate an initial p. Correct examples would be spin, stone, skin. −Woodstone (talk) 16:10, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't believe that the listings are for [b], [d], [g] are correct. In the Beijing dialect, that Standard Chinese is based on, these plosives voiced although they are usually not in Southern China and some of Nothern China. Listen to the news speakers on CCTV (http://news.cntv.cn/). The speakers clearly voice the plosives. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexamies (talk • contribs) 09:28, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Technically, neither English nor Mandarin ordinarily voice the plosives. In English the plosives can be voiced, but normally the plosives are lenis, and English speakers will not hear words with different meaning depending on whether the plosives are lenis or voiced. Mandarin never voices the plosives.

English and Chinese do things differently. I and some other people have tried to clear this matter up, but Woodstone has reverted all changes that disagree with his understanding. Native speakers of English will hear the differences between unaspirated (e.g., "bottle") and aspirated (e.g., "puddle") initial constants, but they will not hear the differences in voicing clearly because of their native language. English has voiced initial consonants (as when Tony Tiger says, "GGGreat") and unvoiced initial consonants (as in "against"), and Mandarin Chinese does not have the voiced initial consonants. The greatest difficulty is in pinning down when voicing begins. In other regional languages, e.g., Taiwanese, there is one kind of plosive that is voiced well before the lips are opened. I will try to "draw" it as:

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
    da

which sounds like "mmmDa."

Then there is the sounds that English and Mandarin both have:

      vvvvvvvvv
     da   

Jerry Norman says, basically: /d/ [d̥] unvoiced and unaspirated; lenis so it sounds as though it were voiced. 道.

Finally, there is the unvoiced sound used in Taiwanese that is not lenis. It delays the voicing until well after the lips open.

       vvvvvvvvvv
     d

Try to really voice the initial consonant as you might when trying to be sarcastic ("Gggreat") or to communicate with someone who wasn't hearing the initial consonant correctly. I think you can see that it is possible to move the voicing earlier than it normally occurs even if you do not go to the extremes used in Taiwanese, where you can clearly hear the vocal folds vibrating before the lips release.

This article is supposed to be on pinyin, not on Chinese pronunciations. IPA is the wrong tool to use because of the history of its development. I think that using their normal speech sounds native speakers of English will not get the plosives "wrong," although speakers of a southern Mandarin will hear them as "different from what we say." The sounds in this article that need to be explained in some detail are the j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, and s sounds that are easy to get wrong. P0M (talk) 16:43, 5 October 2012 (UTC)

Alternatives to Current English Approximations

Perhaps "-shy-" [ʃj] and "-chy-" [t͡ʃj] can be used for English approximations of /ɕ/ and /t͡ɕ/ respectively. (Note, /ɕ/ is a palatalized /ʃ/, /ʃʲ/.)

Attempting to find a word, I used a scrabble finder but only found "churchyard". Two words may work, so perhaps "push your" and "punch your" could be used. Being an English speaker, I can't confirm that this is a fair representation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minime12358 (talk • contribs) 00:45, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

Checking with a native speaker, "churchyard" is a fair representation of j, /t͡ɕ/, "punch you" of q, /t͡ɕʰ/, and "push you" of x, /ɕ/. Should this be added to the main article?

The zh, ch, sh, and r sounds can be approximated somewhat more successfully than the j, q, x sounds. One reason is that in standard Mandarin the first three are retroflex, but speakers from various areas curl their tongues back more or less strongly. So something like the "sher" of "sherbet" can be close to the way that some Chinese speakers handle the sh sound.

The j, q, x sounds, however, are made with the tongue in a position that occurs in a sort of New Jersey regional accent that is not always used by young people today. (You need to find someone who says s/he comes from "New Joisey." You can't make the "jr" or "jer" of "jersey" if the tip of your tongue is not curled down behind the lower front teeth as it is in the standard Chinese j, q, x sounds.

The sounds that you suggest using all have the "tip up" tongue position, and so they would not work to explain or show how j differs from zh, q differs from ch, and x differs from sh.

Something still needs to be done for the clueless radio and TV announcers who pronounce, e.g., "Shi" like English "she." If they could learn "zhr" (or jr), "chr", and "shr" then there would at least be a heard distinction between "xi" and "shi."P0M (talk) 19:48, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Initials and finals discussion.

http://www.coop-edu.com.hk/PTH/sm/shengmu.htm explains initials and finals, etc., very well. Our text says:

Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (see below).

The way it is written makes it seem that every Chinese syllable ought to have an initial consonant from the list of initials and one final from that list. Of course there are many Chinese words that have zero initials. There are also medials involved in many cases. The advantage of explaining the rationale behind the tables is that it gives readers a way to understand how a few tables can lay out all possible syllables in Chinese. The disadvantage is that the linguistics involved, which actually go rather deep, do not have very much to do with the pinyin system itself. The pinyin system is one of many systems that put the "initial-final" phenomena into symbolic forms.

Something needs to be changed. I am in favor of simplifying things in this article and referring readers to more specific discussions of Chinese language initials and finals elsewhere. P0M (talk) 19:30, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Recent changes

Some new user (?) has reverted changes to the initial consonants I made to keep this article consistent with other articles on the English Wikipedia and on the German Wikipedia. You can do that, but to be intellectually honest you ought to go to the other pages that use different IPA spellings and convince them to follow your way of doing things. The note to the edit mentioned "accepted transcription." The question is, "Accepted by whom, and on what authority."

Also, as a matter of good form, you should give your arguments for change here. I did, and nobody said anything until later, after I had made the changes. Mow somebody come from out of nowhere and makes ungrounded pronouncements on what is accepted. P0M (talk) 04:36, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Criticism of pinyin

Pinyin had been criticized by people in guangdong when it was first introduced.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1etgpI0gO4C&pg=PA113&dq=Guangdong+chicken+guts+letters&hl=en&sa=X&ei=IP6nUNmWDMyN0QH2joGIAw&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Guangdong%20chicken%20guts%20letters&f=false

Jerezembel (talk) 21:22, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

finals table

I do not understand how iong begins with ü. Double sharp (talk) 10:43, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

Systems invented to describe pronounced syllables by the use of letters of the alphabet are inherently problematical. It may help understand what is going on to consider an old comedy routine on radio. I think the dialog was between Groucho Marx and Baby somebody-or-other (a grown-up lady who played a baby in a stroller). The whole thing came down to two ways of pronouncing Tuesday, one with open lips and one with pursed lips. The whole thing seemed to boil down to some tension between the two on how to pronounce the word, neither being willing to change, neither being willing to say openly that there was a conflict, and so they went back and forth between "two-zday" and "ti-use-day."

Unlike this case of real English indifference to the difference between /u/ and /ü/, in Chinese it makes a big difference. "Nü" is the sound in "female human being" and "nu" is the sound in "slave," for instance.

Despite having ü available, makers of several kinds of romanization have either not used it or have used it inconsistently. What should be written "üng" (as in "to use") is written "yung" in Wade-Giles and "yong" in pinyin. What should be written "jüng" is written "chiung" in Wade-Giles and "jiong" in pinyin. The general rule is that if the ü sound is at the start of the word it is represented by y and if it is in the middle of a word it is represented by i. (The Yale system uses a y in both places, writing, e.g., "jyung" for the above.)

Nobody understands how to pronounce romanized Chinese without training. There is no way short of a historical record to show why something is represented in a stupid way rather than in a more useful way. Typically, the stupid way is convenient for the people who already know what Chinese is supposed to sound like, and the helpful way would require writing an extra letter, adding a couple of dots over the letter u in some cases, or some other tedious and time-consuming calligraphic tasks. P0M (talk) 15:22, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

I copied and modified my entry from the discussion pinyin table:

Chinese vowels are rather similar to those of Romance languages. ü is not i nor y! English speakers probably hear somehow a "ee"-sound when it's a ü. However, German (ü) and French (u) people would hear a huge difference between ü and i! ü+ong doesn't exist at all. iong belongs to "group i". iong does not belong to "group ü" because the first letter is not ü! Why would it be called "group ü"? Because the first letter of the sound is ü. Besides, the whole grouping is wrong. I don't know how US Chinese dictionaries are, but every Chinese dictionary from China contains a table of vowels. There are four columns, each presenting a group: group no-name (empty cell, no heading), group i, group u and group ü. Group no-name consists of a, o, e, ai, ei, ao, ou, an, en, ang, eng, ong. Groups i, u and ü indicate if there's a combination with group no-name, e.g. next to "an" you find "ian" in column i, "uan" in column u and "üan" in column ü. This is the correct grouping.--95.116.237.236 (talk) 18:16, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

I must admit that some columns are still illogical but it's better than the current table. Here is the table you find in dictionaries from China (each cell with a character example):

	i 衣	u 呜	ü 迂
a 啊	ia 呀	ua 蛙
o 喔		uo 窝
e 鹅	ie 耶		üe 约
ai 哀		uai 歪
ei 欸		uei 威
ao 熬	iao 腰
ou 欧	iou 优
an 安	ian 烟	uan 弯	üan 冤
en 恩	in 因	uen 温	ün 晕
ang 昂	iang 央	uang 汪
eng final of 亨	ing 英	ueng 翁
ong final of 轰	iong 雍

--95.116.237.236 (talk) 18:45, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't follow your reasoning or your prose, starting from where you say "I copied and modified my entry..." I have no idea where you copied some from or how it appears on this discussion page.

"Pinyin table" is an article here in Wikipedia.--95.116.254.100 (talk) 22:26, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Your assertion about what "English speakers probably hear" is groundless.

Groucho Marx and Baby Snooks had a comedy routine about different pronunciations of "Tuesday." One said "2s-day" and the other said "Tüs-day."P0M (talk) 14:54, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Your statement "ü+ong doesn't exist at all" is dogmatic and false. 窘、迥、炯。。。

Maybe you meant that the spelling doesn't occur? That is because of the quirky way that pinyin spells the sound as "iong" (as in "jiong").P0M (talk) 20:05, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Looking at one chart that has been made for the benefit of people who are familiar with IPA and comparing it to a chart that is made for Chinese people who are basically going to avoid any opportunities for misinterpretation because they already understand how their language works is a recipe for chaos. The chart that you reproduce has a history behind it that you are probably unaware of. It reproduces in the roman alphabet some simplifications that were used in the National Phonetic Alphabet (NPA), often called "bo po mo."

You may be aware that some Chinese people pronounce 烏龍茶 wū lóng chá as ū lóng chá (missing the pursing of the lips that distinguishes Wow! from Ow! in English). In NPA both pronunciations would be ㄨ ㄌㄨㄥˊ ㄔㄚˊ. People who learn NPA in primary school learn to treat ㄨ differently depending on whether it is found as the initial sound in a syllable or as a medial or final sound.

烏 is never pronounced with the semivowel. Northern people tend to pronounce IPA [v] before "a" and "e", but this is a different story.--95.116.254.100 (talk) 22:26, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

Never say "never," but if you are right there is even stronger reason for being able to distinguish between "woo" and "ooo" in IPA. I was shocked when the son of my model-Mandarin language teacher said, 再見 with an initial consonant that was the English "z" sound in "zap," not the "dz" sound in normal Mandarin. It was the only time I've ever heard that regional accent. I asked my teacher and she told me, "He gets that from his father, who comes from..." I forget the province, but evidently everybody in that region does a weird ㄗ sound. My point is that China has a fairly large number of regional languages and among each of them another large set of regional differences. Unless you've gone around to each of them and have found an old person who has not been "reprogrammed" by learning standard Mandarin, don't assume that you can count anything out. P0M (talk) 19:16, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Your chart follows the same expectations, that people will know that the uang in 王 is different from the uang in 莊，Pinyin distinguishes the two and writes wang for the first and (zh)uang for the second. 因 and 賓 are not in and bin in pinyin. They are yin and bin. In NPA they are ㄧㄣ and ㄅㄧㄣ.

In the dictionary, there are annotations following the table with un=uen; iu=iou; i, u and ü written with non-sounding y or w and stuff like that.--95.116.254.100 (talk) 22:26, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

That's true. Again, you strengthen the argument that the pinyin spellings of certain sounds were done for the convenience of the people who were inventing the system. One might assume that it was a really lazy individual who thought that it was too much trouble to write "huei" so s/he would tell people just to write "hui" and to hell with the foreigners who would stumble. It fits one of the early story teller's characterization of a gentleman who had received a Ph.D. in the West and returned to pontificate to his inferiors: "他説他的。 懂不懂是聽的人的事情！" A system (IPA, pinyin, bopomofo) that needs extra explanations for normal circumstances is far from ideal for the non-native speaker, and not very good for native speakers trying to say things the correct way. (Just look at English spellings such as "Worchestershire sauce"!)P0M (talk) 19:16, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

NPA is tricky with ü also. 窮 is qiong2 in pinyin, but it is not ㄑㄧㄨㄥ in NPA but ㄑㄩㄥ. 窮 is pronounced in a much different way from 用. However, pinyin expects the reader to recognize that ji, qi, xi followed by "ong" give a vowel sound that is different from, e.g., d followed by "ong" as in 東.

In the dictionary table, there is also bopomofo (I never cared about that because I'm from mainland you know) beneath the pinyin and it is indeed the fact that the bopomofo of iong is ㄩㄥ. However, you have to admit that [j] or [y] in this compound sounds quite similar. Sorry, I'm no linguist but just a native.--95.116.254.100 (talk) 22:26, 31 August 2013 (UTC)

The makers of bopomofo bleeped up in some ways. Again, the expectation was that a native speaker only needed to be landed in the approximate area and s/he would be able to figure things out. The people who have used bpmf to "spell" Taiwanese have done a much better job, in my opinion, with actually "spelling" the words in their dictionaries in bpmf (augmented with a couple extra symbols) so that somebody who doesn't already know what it's supposed to be can still come acceptably close (the departures from the norm probably being more because of mother-language interference than defects in the spelling system).P0M (talk) 19:16, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

The vowel in 窮 is of the pursed-lip variety. It is ü. In many cases pinyin does not use the umlaut unless something could be either a "u" sound or a "ü" sound. So pinyin writes "nü" for 女人， and "nu" for 奴才. But it does not write "yi jü hua" for 一句話 because there is no "ju" sound in Chinese, only "zhu," and there the initial consonant is different.

The original questioner wanted to know how iong begins with ü. The simple answer is that it does so because qiong is the way that pinyin writes 窮，and the vowel sounds different from the one in chong2 蟲.

By itself, iong is written yong in pinyin, but the vowel sound is still the pursed-lip ü sound. In NPA 用 is ㄩㄥ not ㄨㄥ.

P0M (talk) 05:44, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Recent changes in this article and in the associated template

IPA is a rather loosely specified standard for noting pronunciations. If everyone would compare the several IPA sites that give recordings for the symbols used on their charts, then the amount of slop in the situation would be clear.

In the past there has been a fair amount of dogmatism exhibited in the several articles having to do with Standard Mandarin and how to pronounce it. Perhaps all of the competing symbolic representations could be "proven" by finding the person with the right dialect of IPA reading the symbol or group of symbols involved in each case.

Sometimes the IPA "spellings" that are used can be different simply because there is no exact correspondence between the way native speakers pronounce Mandarin. Generally speaking, the range of vowel pronunciations can be noted as falling between two adjacent signs on the IPA vowel chart.

At other times the IPA "spellings" that are used even by sources that one would think would be authoritative are simply wrong. The recent changes illustrated both these phenomena. And, before anybody rushes to judgment, I think the recent changes were improvements. I reverted them only so that we could begin to have a calm discussion, reach a consensus, and maintain a stable page.

The word 周 is written as zhōu in pinyin (and as ㄓㄡ in NPA). I have observed that natives of the Beijing area seem to open their lips much more widely in making this sound than do Americans trying to reproduce the same sound. Therefore the IPA spelling of the vowel portion of this word should not be [ou]. The reason is that both [o] and [u] are "rounded" vowels. The unrounded equivalents of these two IPA values are [ɤ] and [ɯ]. To me it seems appropriate to translate pinyin "ou" as [ɤɯ]. However, with the jaw opened only slightly more the sound would be [ɤʊ]. It may well be that [ɤɯ] would be more appropriate for transliterating pinyin "mou" and [ɤʊ] would be more appropriate for transliterating pinyin "zhou," simply because when making a retroflex initial consonant the jaw will naturally be opened more widely.

The only way I can see to avoid an element of arbitrariness in these IPA spellings would be to find four or more Chinese syllables with identifiably different degrees of mouth opening so that there would be something like this:

first syllable  tɯ  兔
second syllable tɑʊ 桃
third syllable  tɤŋ 疼
fourth syllable tʌ  特
fifth syllable  tɑ  他

I have difficulty hearing the differences in vowels in 疼 and 特, so maybe these are not ideal syllables to use to try to link different IPA symbols to different sounds.

I don't object to pinyin "ou" being written either as [ɤʊ] or [ɤɯ]. What do other people think? P0M (talk) 07:47, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I think it is essential to be consistent throughout Wikipedia and therefore we should use the template {{IPAc-cmn}}. For example, for zhōu you write {{IPAc-cmn|zh|ou|1}} and leave it to the decision of the community how to render this (currently [ʈʂóʊ]). —LiliCharlie (talk) 08:10, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand why you say that I write ... and I leave it to the decision of the community..."

Somebody just changed the template (Pinyin_table) without discussion, and I changed it back -- even though the template is wrong. The community needs to get involved and have a sensible discussion on these matters. There has been a problem over the years with "authorities" telling other people what to do, no? P0M (talk) 08:40, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

All right, that was a generic you. The sentence can be rephrased as: ˌ“For example, for zhōu one writes {{IPAc-cmn|zh|ou|1}} and leaves it to the decision of the community how to render this (currently [ʈʂóʊ]).”

The template I was referring to is {{IPAc-cmn}}. I think it should be used in the template {{Pinyin table}} instead of the template {{IPA}}, which is okay for general phonetic transcription, but for phonetic transcription of Mandarin Chinese the special Pinyin based template {{IPAc-cmn}} should be used for consistency. If you don’t like the transcription [ʈʂóʊ] yielded when one writes {{IPAc-cmn|zh|ou|1}} you can discuss this issue on Template talk:IPAc-cmn in order to change what is displayed. —LiliCharlie (talk) 09:18, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I do not spend a great deal of time working in IPA issues. When I first got involved, there were no templates. Templates, from my limited sphere of observation, came out of nowhere with no explanation even of how to use them. Another contributor changed the article by directly editing a template and in the process changed what appeared to be a long-term consensus view. Now I see that s/he made a change in the direction of what would have appeared if the correct template had been used, or if the Pinyin Table had been edited correctly.

How does one insert the correct template into the Pinyin Table? Maybe, since you are in the know, you could do it so the rest of us might learn one of the undocumented or poorly documented features of the Wikipedia editing process.

Why are there competing templates anyway? Why is there no clear path to finding all this stuff out?

Thanks for the good information.P0M (talk) 16:12, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

I had a look at Template talk:IPAc-cmn . There are some problems, but I don't know where I would go to do anything other than complain about them.P0M (talk) 17:19, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

If you don’t get a reply go ahead and edit {{C-cmn}} (where the values for {{IPAc-cmn}} are defined) and Help:IPA for Mandarin. This is sure to provoke a discussion. —LiliCharlie (talk) 20:44, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

P.S.: When comparing IPA transcriptions of the sound of Standard Mandarin with transcriptions of (your national standard of) English keep in mind the following sentence from p. 18 of the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet: “When a symbol is said to be suitable for the representation of sounds in two languages, it does not necessarily mean that the sounds in the two languages are identical.” And on page 21: “The symbols on the vowel chart can be regarded as providing reference points in the vowel space. They can also be used to represent vowel qualities generally in the area of the corresponding reference points. With vowel symbols it is especially important to note that they may represent slightly different sounds in different languages.” —LiliCharlie (talk) 23:17, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

The statement on page 21 is not only correct but also indicates the situation found among various native speakers of the same language. What I object to are situations in which the proposed values are not "in the ballpark" for native speakers with pronunciations that are generally regarded as correct. For instance, at one point one of the tables for Mandarin would have made the pronunciations for 收 and 説 （shōu and shuō) the same. As far as I know, only badly instructed CSL students make those two sounds into one. In the chart pinyin "ou" and pinyin "uo" were given identical IPA spellings. One of the very nice things about bopomofo is that while uo and ou look almost identical ㄡ and ㄨㄛ look very different. P0M (talk) 07:39, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

The IPA in this article is rather more of phonemic than phonetic character. In that case it is common practice in applying IPA to select unmodified latin characters by preference. So if the sound is anywhere near /ou/ this would be preferred over /ɤɯ/. This is exemplified by the universal use of /r/ in English, which is rarely realised as [r]. −Woodstone (talk) 03:40, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Who is the Lord of the Universe who makes such a decision? The purpose of systems of romanization were all, as far as I know, intended to indicate to learners how certain words are to be pronounced. These good intentions have fairly frequently been sabotaged by the romanizations' various creators for the sake of the convenience (?) of people who are, e.g., too lazy to willingly write "huei" when they could by convention get away with writing "hui" (nobody pronounces 會 as hooey except for foreign students trying to deal with the stupidities of the system).

If a person trying to learn Mandarin takes the IPA values suggested to be used for their "phonemic" character and attempts to get a good indication of how the Chinese should sound by going to a website with recordings for the sounds coded by the IPA symbols, e.g., http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/phonlab/ipatut/index.html, then that student will be instructed to aim for producing incorrect sounds. Ironically, the better the student understands the structure of the vowel charts and the distinctions between unrounded and rounded vowels, the worse may be the results for the "phonemic" transcriptions. Just to make things more problematical, the student will find significant variations between speaker "IPA 1" and speaker "IPA 2," and finding another site will only provide more complexities and ambiguities.

As a result of what was basically a political/ideological struggle in a country with government that maintained an active interest in certain vocabulary items, I learned the importance of being able to identify clearly what something was, how it might be described correctly and objectively, and only then decide what to call it. IPA seems to give definitions that easily can be turned into operational definitions of the sounds associated with IPA symbols. Unfortunately, there are no operational definitions for things like "rounded," "unrounded," "front," "central" "back," etc., etc. One person's "back" may be another person's "halfway between 'back' and 'central.'"

I think that the situation we have with a transcription of a word or a sentence in IPA is rather like the situation found when people (Bernard Karlgren et al.) try to specify pronunciations in ancient Chinese.

If speaker "IPA 1" read a correct IPA transcription of a passage in Chinese (without his having been instructed in Chinese) it ought to sound like a CSL student with no major incorrect sounds but still having a detectable "foreign" accent, or, if very successful the reading might sound like it could have been produced by someone with a "southern Mandarin accent with adequate corrects for retroflex sounds and other major tip-offs of the individual's native speech region."

I am opposed to explanations (in the sciences or wherever) that others defend as "being correct if you understand what the individual was trying to convey." To me, if a locution does not convey what it was intended to convey and do so in a clear and coherent way, then it is not satisfactory. Who cares if it is "correct" but will take the beginner in the subject along a large number of false trails before that person eventually stumbles upon the correct understanding? I think that any device that is used to convey a "correct pronunciation" to interested parties should likewise work transparently and not require some additional words such as, "Of course you have to understand that by writing X we actually mean to convey Y, and smart people will see the utility of this convention as apodictically given."

If the final of 周 is not made with pursed lips, we should not be indicating to people who do not already know that fact that it is made with pursed lips. P0M (talk) 10:49, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

WP:MOS-ZH

You guys can head over there to talk about changing the policy but, for now, kindly keep the mess of characters and romanizations and former romanizations out of the running text in the first paragraph, since it's all already easily available in the infobox. Similarly, where the English is perfectly clear (Chinese characters), do not include the Chinese characters (汉字) on this page since it's linked through. Thanks. — LlywelynII 06:48, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Changes relating to discussions above.

I have now rewritten the lead to take care of explaining what "pin yin" means and supplying a valid citation to substantiate that explanation. I have also made the part about "reverse transcription" concrete enough to be meaningful to the average well-informed reader. P0M (talk) 07:10, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm now down to the first problematical part --- where it starts with some rather obscure differences between what one gets with correct decoding of pinyin and what one gets when using regular English-rules decoding. I will need to replace the diagram with a SVG version. Patience, please. P0M (talk) 20:21, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

Sections have been added basing IPA rendering of pinyin letters on the pronunciation in Taiwan. Since pinyin is based on Mandarin, this must be considered original research. I strongly object to the deviant rendering of b d g other than the usual [p t k]. −Woodstone (talk) 05:03, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

It's not a secret that Taiwanese works the way I have described. It should be possible for me to find the appropriate citations. However, I agree that bringing in another Chinese language as a way to clarify the differences among initial consonant sounds may bring in too much tangential information. There are other articles such as Standard Chinese phonology that use the "unvoiced" diacritics, and there are articles on other regional languages that will use [p], [t], and [k] to refer to sounds that are not found in standard English. It is not good for the readers to have contradictory information spread out among a few articles.

As for the pejorative "deviant:" First, science does not go by popularity contests, especially among people who are not themselves scientists who are competent in whatever issues are under inquiry. Second, it is not clear to me that the leading figures in the field have united on a common IPA reference system. Dylan Sung's website gets at the same differences among the bilabials, but in a different way. (http://dylansung.tripod.com/chinese/min.htm)

It is, in general, better to get clear on what is actually there first, and then to try to find some adequate way to name or symbolize it. It doesn't work to start with arguments over terminology.

One advantage of the notation using diacritics, from the point of view of the average well-informed reader, is that, e.g., "b̥in" is easily interpreted as something that sounds close to the English "bin" but must be a little different somehow, whereas "pin" is likely to get interpreted as something more line the Engish word "pin."

There has already been considerable discussion on this article, with one reader suggesting that we make our article more consistent with the German Wikipedia article. That discussion seemed reasonable and the reader/editor's point was not refuted. At a minimum, to avoid inconsistencies across articles, we need to be able to symbolize three different kinds of sounds, the kind with vocalization that begins before air escapes, the kind with vocalization that begins just as air begins to escape, and the kind with vocalization that begins after air begins to escape. P0M (talk) 18:19, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

After calling the transcriptions used in German and in other English wiki pages "deviant," nothing further has been heard from Woodstone. I have been doing some additional research, including writing to Dylan Sung (who has not responded yet). Just now I found the following review article:orient.avcr.cz/miranda2/export/sitesavcr/data.avcr.../sounds.pdf On p. 512 it says: "It is worth noting that explaining aspiration (p. 37), the differences between the English and Mandarin aspirates in speech production might have been mentioned (compare English two with SC tù 兔‘rabbit’), as well as the influence of the following vowel (the nature of aspiration in tù 兔 as compared with qì 气 ‘air’). Let us also remark the lenis nature of the unaspirated voiced stops b, d, g can be expressed by a narrow transcription [b̥ ], [d̥], [g̥], as in Chao, 1968:22. Similarly, Dragunov and Dragunova, 1955:61, who also apply an analogical notation to the affricates z, zh, j, transcribing them as [d̥z], [d̥ž], [d̥ź]. We view such transcription as very advantageous." [Lenis: "Articulated with relatively low pressure of the airstream below the glottis."] The "Chao" mentioned is the famous linguist Yuen-ren Chao (Y.R. Chao), A Grammar of Spoken Chinese.

I think that evidence and argument is preferable to anything that could lead to edit warring.P0M (talk) 05:36, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Proper Nouns

The correct spelling is "Pinyin", it is a proper noun. The correct spelling is "Romanisation" or "Romanization", it too is a proper noun. The is only one Standard Mandarin. Arguing regional variances in pronunciation is pointless. Thye simply are not Standard Mandarin. It is very arrogant to argue pronunciation of Romanization from the basis of "Anglicization". Pinyin was not based on English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drmmhmd (talk • contribs) 16:04, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

The correct spelling is "Pinyin", it is a proper noun. The correct spelling is "Romanisation" or "Romanization", it too is a proper noun. The is only one Standard Mandarin. Arguing regional variances in pronunciation is pointless. They simply are not Standard Mandarin. It is very arrogant to argue pronunciation of Romanization from the basis of "Anglicization". Pinyin was not based entirely on English.

Drmmhmd (talk) 16:07, 2 July 2014 (UTC)新明Drmmhmd (talk) 16:07, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Baidu says: 现在世界各国所用的文字多数是拼音文字，我国的藏文、蒙古文、维吾尔文等也都是 ... Pinyin is a common noun. Even if you said 漢語拼音 one could argue that there are many systems of romanization for Chinese. That being said, if one capitalizes the word many people would recognize that the pinyin system supported by the PRC is intended.

"Romanization" is also not a proper noun. Any language that originally had its own method of written expression (or no system) and is later written out in the letter system derived from the Romans is a romanization. See Romanization_of_Russian for instance.

There is a theoretical construct called Standard Mandarin. However, everybody will pronounce it with some differences from all others (possibly excluding identical twins). There is no absolute rule for how much deviation from the arbitrary standard is sufficient to disqualify something from being "standard."

Please stop changing "romanization" to "Romanization." Argue the point here if you must, but you are wrong. "Romanization" is not a proper noun. P0M (talk) 01:35, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

I concur with P0M. The word "pinyin" is not a proper noun and nor is the word "romanisation". In addition, I strongly object to the changing of the capitalisation within the title of references. In the reference citation you must use the title as it appears on the source, even if it is erroneous, because otherwise people will not be able to identify the source correctly. Rincewind42 (talk) 02:53, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

My Merrian-Webster Dictionary of 2003 gives pinyin and romanization as the first (i.e. the recommended) spelling, but also mentions Ccapitalization by some speakers-writers. My Oxford English Dictionary gives Pinyin also Pin-yin, Pin-Yin. The OED knows of no capitalized variant of romanization in sense 4. Transliteration into Roman characters; adoption of the Roman alphabet. LiliCharlie (talk) 14:33, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

Drmmhmd, hanzi is certainly not a proper noun either but a count noun, as it is quite possible to say things like the nearly 76,000 hanzi of Unicode 7.0 and each hanzi fits in a square. — Since you obviously lack the linguistic skills to test the sub-class of English nouns: please refrain from unsourced editing. LiliCharlie (talk) 08:30, 5 July 2014 (UTC) LiliCharlie (talk) 08:32, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

"Hanyu Pinyin" is a proper name derived from the term 汉语拼音, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, which, according to the rules of 汉语拼音, is capitalized. Hanyu is a proper noun just as "English“ is a proper noun. There are many "pinyin" systems and all of them are capitalized when they are specific, as they are proper names. "pinyin' can be used generically and un-capitalized. "Romanization" is a proper name not related to making anything "Roman", there is no root word "roman", only "Roman". "-ization" is a suffix used to change certain nouns into a verb, it is a process. Just as "catheterisation" does not turn a penis into a catheter, "Romanisation" does not turn anything into a "Roman" as it refers to the "Roman" alphabetic system, not a person "Roman".

Drmmhmd (talk) 03:20, 5 July 2014 (UTC)drmmhmdDrmmhmd (talk) 03:20, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Approximately 18 years after I was born in Beijing, I, along with millions of other students wrote an exam that you may know as the 普通高等学校招生. The first part of the exam is 汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn. There are rules for writing 汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn that are in fact "law" in China. 汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn is a "proper name". The Hàn of 汉语 Hànyǔ refers to the 汉族 Hànzú, the ethnic majority of China. Just like "English" or "American" these are proper names hence capitalized. You will note that all of the previous Pinyin (note the capitalization) words are capitalized. This is the "law" in China that creates a standardized "Romanization" for the 汉字 Hànzì . Please note that this is also capitalized as it is a proper name and "law" in China.

This comment;

Drmmhmd, hanzi is certainly not a proper noun either but a count noun, as it is quite possible to say things like the nearly 76,000 hanzi of Unicode 7.0 and each hanzi fits in a square. — Since you obviously lack the linguistic skills to test the sub-class of English nouns: please refrain from unsourced editing. LiliCharlie (talk) 08:30, 5 July 2014 (UTC) LiliCharlie (talk) 08:32, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

is entertaining and belies a simplicity of intellect and lack of knowledge of what the word 汉字 Hànzì is. 汉字 Hànzì is not a simple word but a compound. It would seem that you need to be schooled in the grammar and construction of "Chinese". As you may not know, "Chinese" grammar words and "English" grammar words (note the capitalization) are different with some overlap but over a dozen categories of words that compose "Chinese" grammar do not exist in English. The reason that your "hanzi" is not a count noun is because it is a compound word, functionally a phrase, to use the "English" term. Your, "the nearly 76,000 hanzi of Unicode 7.0 and each hanzi fits in a square." is a pathetic attempt at blending two languages. You could say that "the nearly 76,000 Han characters of Unicode 7.0 and each Han character fits in a square." The is linguistically correct. Writing "han" or "hanz"i is as correct as writing "american" or "american english", if you wrote that on an exam it would simply be marker as wrong.

One of the characteristics of English (note the capitalization) "proper names" is that they cannot be conventionally modified by the usual rules of the parent language grammar. You cannot "Chevroletize" something, but, on keeping with you incorrect example of "count noun" you can say "Chevrolet car", note the functional relationship with the 汉语拼音 Hànyǔ Pīnyīn word Hànzì (note the capitalization).

Incidently, Chinese people find it very entertaining that 外国人 keep writing in their literature that "each Han character fits in a square".

To use Baidu as a reference, is, well, entertaining and belies a non-academic education. You do know that the internet is flawed, right?

"pinyin" can be used as a generic term such as; there are many different "pinyin". However, in keeping with the rules of your language, any reference of a "proper noun" such as Hanyu Pinyin, is abbreviated using the components of the proper noun, hence, if this wiki article is about the pinyin variant described and put into law by the Chinese government, it is correctly Anglicized (note the capitalization) as Pinyin. You "armchair" professors are entertaining, the fact that one of you "concurs" only demonstrates your group psychosis. That fact that there are references that substantiate your position does not make your position correct. Translating 汉字 to 汉语拼音 is a standardized process to allow improvement in literacy using a standardized system. It is reliable and reproducible. Changing 汉语拼音 to an Anglicized version is simply removing the diacritic markers.

When I get a chance I will further educate you.

"Since you obviously lack the linguistic skills to test the sub-class of English nouns: please refrain from unsourced editing." ahahahahahahaha!, I have not laughed so hard for so long, thank you.

"unsourced editing", hilarious, am I allowed to use books that I wrote on 汉字 and 汉语拼音 as references?

Drmmhmd (talk) 15:23, 11 July 2014 (UTC)drmmhmdDrmmhmd (talk) 15:23, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

It would be better if we avoid denigrating other people in these discussions. Let us start with the word "romanization." The Mirriam-Webster dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romanization) says "often capitalized" when it refers making something more like Roman society or Roman Catholicism, and does not capitalize when it means to use the alphabet used to write Latin in ancient Roma. An edition of Webster's New World Dictionary of the English Language published in the 1950s capitalizes the word, but it seems not to distinguish things like "making practices conform to those of the Roman church" from things like "writing Russian in English letters." One of the characteristics of English is that it changes fairly rapidly, so it is difficult to make unchanging rules that can apply to it. LiliCharlie has already pointed out that another standard dictionary also shows that "romanization" is sometimes capitalized and sometimes not. Observe also that "romance" is not capitalized even though it too has "Roman" as its linguistic source.

The eminent Chinese linguistic authority, Zhao Yuanren, uses "romanization" when he is talking about various ways of writing Chinese out in letters. He uses "Gwoyeu Romatzyh (National Romanization)" when he is discussing the well-known system of tonal spelling of Chinese.P0M (talk) 17:57, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Please keep this discussion on topic. Telling people what they can an cannot do on Wikipedia is violating the very essence of what the word 'wiki' means. Also please read Help:Using talk pages to learn how to contribute on talk pages such as this one without making a mess.

Count nouns is irrelevant to this discussion. Whither something is or is not countable does not change whither it is or is not a proper noun. Equally, the rules of grammar in the Chinese language is irrelevant to an article written in the English language – even if the article is discussing Chinese, it remains in English and follows English grammar rules. Multiple editors on this page as well as Jpatokal at Talk:Romanization#Capitalize term or not have stated that romanization is not a proper noun. Rincewind42 (talk) 07:10, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Exactly. This Wikipedia follows the English rules for spelling and capitalization. (Incidentally, my 两岸现代汉语常用词典 issued simultaneously by 北京语言大学 and （臺北）中華語言研習所 gives Hànyǔ pīnyīn, not Hànyǔ Pīnyīn; and this seems in accordance with the current 汉语拼音 spelling rules in PR China. But it is as irrelevant for English spelling as is obligatory capitalization of Hamburger in German. What is more important: In English we also write Latin alphabet, not Latin Alphabet.) LiliCharlie (talk) 13:08, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Most native speakers of English find these sounds difficult

Seriously? Most of the sounds have a counterpart in English, it's just ji, qi, xi which don't exist in English. You can argue zhi, chi, shi are retroflex, but it doesn't matter. The whole South of China have problems with retroflex sounds. And the unaspirated/aspirated vs voiced/voiceless in English isn't an issue either. --2.245.104.175 (talk) 21:23, 16 October 2014 (UTC)

Oddities in sections on "apostrophe" and "other romanizations"

The section titled "Note on the apostrophe" contains: This ambiguity does not occur when tone marks are used: The two tone marks in Xīān unambiguously show that the word consists of two syllables. That is true for this example (Xīān), but even with tone marks píngān is still ambiguous so the statement is not generally true.

The "Chart of comparison with other romanizations" (which looks like five charts to me, not a single "Chart") includes Zhuyin. This is quite confusing, since it is obvious to anyone looking at the chart that Zhuyin does not use the Latin alphabet. If this is intentional, and not a mix-up of "romanization" and "phonetic system" (the root cause of much misunderstanding I've seen in impassioned debates of Zhuyin vs Hanyu pinyin), then there needs to be an explanation that reveals on what basis Zhuyin is considered a romanization. --Zahzuhzaz (talk) 19:40, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

External links

I'm cleaning up the External links section, removing links to similar pages and links that I deem inappropriate. Links that I have removed are:

Removed link	Reason for removal
1. Pinyin-Table with 1640 Audio recordings for each of the syllable	Same information as Pinyin Chart with Audio, but less compact
2. (Proper sound of pinyin from zdic.net with sounds, require java script turned on)	Page is in Chinese; provides nothing that's not already covered by Pinyin Chart with Audio; requires Java
3. Pinyin-Hanzi-English Chinese-English dictionary	Why include this dictionary, but not the dozens of other dictionaries elsewhere on the internet?
4. Pinyin-English news summary for learners of Chinese language	Already covered under See also: Pinyin reading material
5. Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography (National Standard of the People's Republic of China (ICS 01.140.10), 1996. Now superseded by GB/T 16159-2012 below.)	Dead link
6. Interactive Pinyin Table	Same information as Pinyin Chart with Audio, but has annoying popup ads
7. Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Table	Same information as Pinyin Chart with Audio, but less compact
8. pinyinAID	repeats much of what's covered in this article
9. Table of Combinations of Initials and Finals (Pinyin.info)	Same information as Pinyin Chart with Audio, but no audio
10. Free Chinese Pronunciation Online	paid app
11. Pinyin Listening Test for 4 Tones	Javascript, Flash 9+ and Java Applet required for audio.

Objections & discussion are welcome. Phlar (talk) 04:56, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

I appreciate every single removal, Phlar. Well done! 👍 Thanks a lot. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 10:27, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Original research

The revision of 2016-02-06T00:43:18 is an original research. The key concept of Hashimoto’s analysis is the symmetry between /a/ and /ə/. And if there is no nucleus, a medial and a coda cannot coexist. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 23:41, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

No it is a synthesis of that analysis with Duanmu's analysis which analyses ong to be /u/+/ŋ/ and analyses ong and weng to be different. See Duanmu (2007) page 56 (which discusses the separability of ong and weng) and the appendix.--Officer781 (talk) 04:05, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

The phonetical difference between weng and -ong doesn’t matter if we follow Hashimoto because they are in complementary distribution. If Duanmu has explicitly written the table you made, we should have two separate tables. Don’t mix Hashimoto’s theory with Duanmu’s. They are probably on different levels of abstraction. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:51, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Duanmu doesn't explicitly write the table, but he analyses yin to be /i/+/n/, ong to be /u/+/ŋ/, iong to be /i/+/u/+/ŋ/ (can be considered to result from the splitting of /y/ into /i/+/u/ due to backness assimilation with /ŋ/) and yun to be /y/+/n/. The rest mostly agrees with Hashimoto. weng he analyses as /u/+/ə/+/ŋ/ which is the same as Hashimoto.--Officer781 (talk) 06:26, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Why don't we inform users of the existence of competing analyses? Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 07:00, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

The longer I consider this the more I think it is desirable to present both analyses, since they are—at least in part—reflected by systematic differences between Hànyǔ Pīnyīn and Zhùyīn Fúhào. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 07:35, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Right. I have created a similar table in Bopomofo. Hashimoto’s analysis is clearly seen. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 08:31, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Surely a comparison of the different analyses belongs in Standard Chinese phonology (and possibly Erhua), rather than being duplicated across all the notation articles. It makes sense for the Pinyin or Bopomofo articles to discuss the analysis on which the system is based (if supported by sources), but that wouldn't be Hashimoto, who postdates both. Kanguole 13:38, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Agree with Kanguole. I've decided that technical articles like the two above should have Duanmu's analysis because that one is more specific and as such more amiable to analysis. For the notation articles, they should use Hashimoto's analysis because these do not mind less specific analyses. Additionally the standard chinese phonology article should also have Hashimoto's analysis. I've found Hashimoto's analysis not very amiable for erhua so I've swapped that for Duanmu's (the u finals don't obey the patterns).--Officer781 (talk) 14:06, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

On second thought the Bopomofo table can stay.--Officer781 (talk) 14:09, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Why should the notation articles use Hashimoto's analysis? Bopomofo is based on a traditional analysis of a final as medial+rhyme, and that's sufficient for the romanizations too, e.g.

finals in Bopomofo and pinyin

		ㄛ	ㄜ	ㄝ	ㄚ	ㄟ	ㄞ	ㄡ	ㄠ	ㄣ	ㄢ	ㄥ	ㄤ	ㄦ
	i	o	e		a	ei	ai	ou	ao	en	an	eng	ang	er
ㄧ	i			ie	ia			iu	iao	in	ian	ing	iang
ㄨ	u	uo			ua	ui	uai			un	uan	ong	uang
ㄩ	ü			üe						ün	üan	iong

Yes, a pairing of the rhymes is apparent, but applying a 2-vowel system is going beyond the original intent. Kanguole 15:39, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh yeah, this works more naturally since it separates the e, ie, uo, üe row. I'd vote for the implementation of this style of table across all notation articles. However I think it's best if it's customised to suit the specifics of each notation. For example, while Zhuyin can use that table above, pinyin would preferably have the ong, iong separated from the eng, ueng and having ying separated from the other two (preferably, separate according to letter. a rimes go into one section, e rimes into another, o rimes (including ong, iong) into yet another, and null rimes into the final section).--Officer781 (talk) 00:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

An example for pinyin below:

Nucleus		a					e				o			∅
Coda		∅	-i	-o	-n	-ng	∅	-i	-n	-ng	∅	-u	-ng	∅	-n	-ng
Medial	∅	[a] a -a	[ai̯] ai -ai	[au̯] ao -ao	[an] an -an	[aŋ] ang -ang	[ɤ] e -e	[ei̯] ei -ei	[ən] en -en	[əŋ] eng -eng		[ou̯] ou -ou	[ʊŋ] -ong	[ɨ] -i
	y-, -i-	[i̯a] ya -ia		[i̯au̯] yao -iao	[i̯ɛn] yan -ian	[i̯aŋ] yang -iang	[i̯e] ye -ie					[i̯ou̯] you -iu	[i̯ʊŋ] yong -iong	[i] yi -i	[in] yin -in	[iŋ] ying -ing
	w-, -u-	[u̯a] wa -ua	[u̯ai̯] wai -uai		[u̯an] wan -uan	[u̯aŋ] wang -uang		[u̯ei̯] wei -ui	[u̯ən] wen -un	[u̯əŋ] weng	[u̯o] wo -uo 3			[u] wu -u
	yu-, -ü-				[y̯ɛn] yuan -üan 2		[y̯e] yue -üe 2							[y] yu -ü 2	[yn] yun -ün 2

As it seems more natural, I will implement this table unless there are any concerns voiced here.--Officer781 (talk) 02:19, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I think this format over-emphasizes the vowel letters, which are not intended as a phonemic analysis in any of these romanizations, and makes it more difficult to compare romanizations. One more often sees authors grouping the finals by coda, on which everyone agrees, e.g.

		Coda
		∅				-i		-u		-n			-ng
Medial	∅	[ɨ] -i	[ɤ] e -e		[a] a -a	[ei̯] ei -ei	[ai̯] ai -ai	[ou̯] ou -ou	[au̯] ao -ao		[ən] en -en	[an] an -an		[əŋ] eng -eng	[ʊŋ] -ong	[aŋ] ang -ang
	y-, -i-	[i] yi -i	[i̯e] ye -ie		[i̯a] ya -ia			[i̯ou̯] you -iu	[i̯au̯] yao -iao	[in] yin -in		[i̯ɛn] yan -ian	[iŋ] ying -ing		[i̯ʊŋ] yong -iong	[i̯aŋ] yang -iang
	w-, -u-	[u] wu -u		[u̯o] wo -uo 3	[u̯a] wa -ua	[u̯ei̯] wei -ui	[u̯ai̯] wai -uai				[u̯ən] wen -un	[u̯an] wan -uan		[u̯əŋ] weng		[u̯aŋ] wang -uang
	yu-, -ü-	[y] yu -ü 2	[y̯e] yue -üe 2							[yn] yun -ün 2		[y̯ɛn] yuan -üan 2

Most authors would compact that a bit more:

		Coda
		∅			-i		-u		-n		-ng
Medial	∅	[ɨ] -i	[ɤ] e -e	[a] a -a	[ei̯] ei -ei	[ai̯] ai -ai	[ou̯] ou -ou	[au̯] ao -ao	[ən] en -en	[an] an -an	[əŋ] eng -eng	[ʊŋ] -ong	[aŋ] ang -ang
	y-, -i-	[i] yi -i	[i̯e] ye -ie	[i̯a] ya -ia			[i̯ou̯] you -iu	[i̯au̯] yao -iao	[in] yin -in	[i̯ɛn] yan -ian	[iŋ] ying -ing	[i̯ʊŋ] yong -iong	[i̯aŋ] yang -iang
	w-, -u-	[u] wu -u	[u̯o] wo -uo 3	[u̯a] wa -ua	[u̯ei̯] wei -ui	[u̯ai̯] wai -uai			[u̯ən] wen -un	[u̯an] wan -uan	[u̯əŋ] weng		[u̯aŋ] wang -uang
	yu-, -ü-	[y] yu -ü 2	[y̯e] yue -üe 2						[yn] yun -ün 2	[y̯ɛn] yuan -üan 2

That leaves the contentious issue of the -ong finals, but at least they're near to weng in this arrangement. That's the virtue of grouping by coda, and probably why so many authors use it: small differences in representation of vowels yield only small displacements in the table. It also makes it easier to compare different notations for the same phonology. Kanguole 11:14, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Alright, will implement the latest table.--Officer781 (talk) 13:11, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

How many characters?

I've read half the article and it seems some key points are missing. First, this appears to use single characters for a single sound, as compared to traditional Chinese writing of one symbol per word or per consonant-vowel combination, but that's never stated. Also, the total number of characters is either not stated or buried deep in the article. A more general overview for the new-comer would be useful. Nerfer (talk) 16:38, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

@Nerfer:, simplified and traditional characters are independent from pinyin. Pinyin is the same for both. The difference between the character sets is to reduce the number of strokes per character and nothing to do with "one symbol per word or per consonant-vowel combination". The number of characters is indeterminate and estimated at over 40,000. That information is not directly relevant to this article in the same way that the number of words in a language would have little relevance in an article about the alphabet of that language. What might be of interest would be the total number of legal pinyin combinations which is much less than 40,000 and would highlight the homophone challenge of Chinese.Sthubbar (talk) 05:47, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Oh. This whole article talks about the romanization of Chinese, so I assumed pinyin was writing based on a Roman (Latin) alphabet of some kind. No wonder I was confused. Nerfer (talk) 16:06, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

@Nerfer:, well, I must be misunderstanding you as well. I took your mention of "traditional" above to mean traditional characters versus simplified characters and now I think you had a different meaning. For the information you want to add, if you have a reference, then go ahead and add it.Sthubbar (talk) 01:27, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

No, you had it right. I don't have anything helpful to add, I appreciate your feedback. Nerfer (talk) 04:00, 24 January 2017 (UTC)