Classical Chinese Primer
Romanization

Spelling Mandarin

Pronouncing Mandarin is not very difficult, but the problem of how to spell it continues to plague both the professionals and the public. The systems in use have not been designed for either scientific accuracy or general convenience, and none of the alternate spellings so far proposed (and there have been many) has made headway with users. The contrast with Japanese, where the common Hepburn convention gives a spelling that is unproblematic for users with educated English (ie, Continental) alphabetic reflexes, is painful. We propose an extension of the simple Hepburn system to Chinese, with some special conventions for vowels not present in Chinese (and some present in English but having no regular alphabetic symbol). This suggestion may also be seen as the elimination of the phonemic features of the Yale Romanization, leading to a purely phonetic system which is fairly convenient for readers with English alphabetic reflexes.

The result is called the Common Alphabetic system. We use it in these Lessons.

Guidelines

The basic guideline is the familiar mnemonic "vowels as in English, consonants as in Italian" plus the following:

• ae (digraph æ) for the vowel of "cat."
• v for the vowel of "up"
  • this is the linguist's "inverted v," but here uninverted
  • (think of it as next door to "u" in the alphabet)
• r for the vowel of "fur" (has a slightly fricative quality in Chinese)
• z for the last sound in "adz," but used as a vowel
• yw (after l and n, simply w) for the "umlaut u" sound
  • (think of it as "u," but doubled as "w" to represent the two dots of the umlaut)

Tones are represented by contour marks over the vowel. Unfortunately, these cannot be employed on the Internet, and in these pages we substitute the standard postposed numerals. For guidance on this and other pronunciation matters, see Pronunciation.

Detail

For more detail, we offer in the Reference section of this site:

• Overview of Mandarin Pronunciation
• Romanization Conversion Tables (CA, Pinyin, and Wade-Giles systems)

The above is merely for purposes of explaining our conventional Mandarin pronunciation, so you can get started memorizing the Lesson materials. Later on, you will want to consult our separate page on Historical Pronunciation.

Apologies are herewith rendered to newcomers facing these spelling complexities. They owe their survival, in part, to a love of mystification on the part of specialists, which is a hard quality to eradicate. We have done our best to explain the complexities, and provide a path through them. Any more general relief will have to be the work of some larger group, working in some future century.

Classical Chinese Primer is Copyright © 2000- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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