Pronunciation Guide
Pronouncing Chinese words, as they are usually spelled on the page, has been strangely difficult for the novice reader. This is due to the misleading conventions which are often used to represent Chinese sounds. By contrast, Japanese has always been spelled in a straightforward and unproblematic way, which gives no particular trouble to foreign readers. We here employ a romanization convention which is more easily "guessable" at sight, by readers with English alphabetic reflexes, to avoid embarrassment, and aid memory. Those familiar with the Hepburn system for Japanese will recognize that we are here using the same conventions, extended to cover the case of a few Chinese vowel sounds which, though they are familiar as sounds to English speakers, are not provided for in the Latin alphabet.
The most important of these are:
ae (as in "cat")
r (as in "fur")
v (as in "up)
yw (umlaut "u," as in über")
after l- or n-, this sound is spelled just "w"
z (for a vowel equivalent of the "z" consonant, as in "adz")A word from the teacher, or a few minutes with a Chinese-speaking classmate, should clear up any remaining uncertainties.
There are also four word tones, whose sounds are familiar from English intonation ("Réally? Yès!"). But they cannot systematically be represented on the Internet, and so, except for distinguishing the pre-Imperial state of Hán from the unified Hàn Dynasty, we have ignored them in this preliminary on-line version. Even with tones, two other states (both pronounced in modern times as Wèi) cannot be distinguished. One of them, the more important, used to have an inigial ng- sound in its name. That sound is lost in modern Mandarin. We have restored the lost ng- to avoid confusion, and thus write the larger of the two states as "Ngwèi."
For additional information, see these pages in the Reference section of this site:
Chinese Pronunciation
Chinese Romanization Conversion Tables
The Hundred Voices is Copyright © 1994- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks
22 Jan 2007 / Contact The Authors / Exit to Contents List
