Phonetic writing systems for Chinese
The idea of having a semantic writing system that does not represent the language pronunciation but the meaning of its words, like Chinese’s writing, seems wonderfully useful to connect people who speak different languages. But... What about their pronunciation? There is actually some indication in Chinese characters about the way they are pronounced, since most of them include a phonetic root, but these indications make reference to the pronunciation of simpler characters, so at least you need to know the simpler ones. Besides, the phonetic component of the characters often refers to an old pronunciation, different to the contemporary one. In any case, this kind of etymological trace appears in most writing systems with some hundred years of history.
Of course, the problem with this kind of semantic writing system is that you need to learn not only the characters or “letters”, as you would do with an alphabetic system, but a whole ensemble of lexical units: a dictionary! But do not panic. Most characters have a recursive graphic structure, where complex characters are composed of smaller characters in specific positions: left-right, top-bottom, top-right-left, etc. Therefore, if you learn some basic characters, you can construct some more complex ones.
But anyway, even if Chinese writing system has the unique advantage of allowing people who speak different languages to communicate, certain social purposes may require a transcription of the actual sounds expressed by the writing system. In this way, several transcription systems have been created in the history of the Chinese language, with more or less success, and often for needs that were more political than social. Let’s review here the most widespread systems for transcribing Chinese.
Before 20th century
First steps
Fanqie
‘Phags-pa Alphabet
Romanisation by European Missionaries
The Postal System
20th - 21st century
Romanizations
Wade-Giles
Yale Romanization
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Tongyong pinyin
Latinxua Sinwen
Hanyu Pinyin
French EFEO system
New (chinese-based) scripts
Guanhua Zimu
Zhuyin Fuhao, aka Bopomofo
Other systems
Before 20th century
First steps (Chinese)
Even taking into account that tones are fully distinctive, you can find a great quantity of homophones in Chinese. This also happens in other languages, like French, but the particularity of Chinese linguistic tradition is that this homophony has been widely used to indicate the pronunciation of some characters. Indeed, what do you do when you are confronted with a character that you don’t know? How do you pronounce it? Writers of Chinese, from the beginning of its history, have glossed infrequent or complex characters by providing a simpler and well known character that has the same pronunciation.
Fanqie (Chinese)
The need for a phonetic transcription of the language was felt as early as the 6th century. Under the Zhou dynasty, Chinese syllables were represented phonetically, as a combination of an initial consonant (or onset) and a final part (the rime, including nucleus and coda, as you would say in modern phonology). This system, called fanqie, distinguished an optional consonantic onset from a vocalic nucleus with a tone, and optionally, a final consonant. The onset is indicated with the character 德, while the rime is signaled by 反. The output of this pronunciation is composed by the character to transcribe (like 東, in the example), one character indicating the onset consonant (here, 德), one with the same rime (here, 紅), and the character 反, that shows that these characters are taken just by their phonetic value.
In this way, the pronunciation of 東 dōng can be rendered by the formula 東德紅反 (dōng = dé + hóng). Like other system-internal phonetic representations, this auxiliary system is circular, and only useful if you already know a considerable number of characters and their pronunciation. The fanqie system has been used from the dynasties Sui (581-617) and Tang (618-907) until the 20th century, although some sources cite examples from Han dynasty in the 3rd century). For centuries, Chinese scholars have studied the historic pronunciation of characters thanks to a work that registers them in Fanqie: the phonetic dictionary Qieyun, completed by Lu Fayan in 601 and amplified in the Guangyun (1008). You will find more details in the following video from Youtube's NativLang channel:
‘Phags-pa Alphabet (Mongols)
When Mongols invaded China in 1234, ending with the Song dynasty, the new Yuan dynasty replaced Chinese officials with Mongols, who could understand the language, but not the writing. Thus, not knowing how to write or read, they resorted to the phonetic writing systems they knew in order to transcribe the languages of the empire, like Mongol or Chinese. Firstly, they wrote Chinese language in the Uyghur alphabet that Gengis Khan had ordered to adopt when he seized power and was already in use. Later on, Kublai Khan commanded the Tibetan monk Drogön Chögyal to design a writing system for the different languages of the empire (Mongol, Chinese and Tibetan varieties, Uyghur, Sanskrit, Persian, etc.). This system, the ‘Phags-pa alphabet, was used through the Yuan dynasty, and was abandoned with the coming of the Ming dynasty (1368). It uses Tibetan characters, within the particularity of being disposed vertically, just as Mongol writing system. If you know some Korean, you can notice the ‘Phags-pa alphabet was an influential source in the creation of the Korean written system Hangul.
Romanisation by European Missionaries (Western)
European evangelisation missions started being established in China from the 16th century, where missionaries had to learn the language in their quest of evangelisation. But how to transmit the Evangiles? The Jesuits produced a considerable number of Christian works into Chinese, and some of them started writing the Chinese language with latin characters, which was useful for new missionaries and others who could not read Chinese in order to read the evangiles aloud for the local population. This romanisation, started by the pioneer Jesuit Matteo Ricci, and continued by the Spanish Diego de Pantoja and the French Nicolas Trigault, was particularly useful to transcribe Chinese proper names, whose pronunciation could be codified by only using the characters. This idea of transcribing Asian languages with latin characters inspired French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, who created the latinisation system for Vietnamese that is in use today.
After the prohibition of missionaries in the Qing dynasty during the late 18th-century, their return in the 19th century motivated the creation of bilingual dictionaries, like Morrison’s English-Chinese dictionary, which included a system of transcription for Chinese. In this period, missionaries went one step forward and also transcribed other sinitic languages such as Cantonese or Southern Min (Hoikkien). Several transcription systems were created and some are still claimed today. Among the most famous you will find the following:
Pe̍h-ōe-jī, the 19th C. romanisation for Southern Min dialects such as Taiwanese Hokkien and Amoy Hokkien
Peng'im, a romanisation for the Teochew Southern Min dialect.
The Postal System (Western)
The increase of communications between East and West in19th century made it necessary to be able to transcribe proper names in the Latin alphabet, and specially place names, in order to establish a mail service. Many of these postal system romanizations, generalised by the use for media and communication, persist still today as an alternative (traditional and often outdated) way of transcribing cities. In the 80s, with the generalisation of the hanyu pinyin romanisation, these traditional denominations were replaced by the current ones, although some are still used today in the West. The following table show some examples:
II. 20th - 21st century
Romanizations
Wade-Giles
Until the generalisation of the currently used system hanyu pinyin in the 1980s, the most widely used system for transcribing Chinese was the Wade-Giles romanisation, created by two British specialists from Cambridge University; Giles modified Wade’s initial syllabary and published it in 1892. It uses some letters from the Latin alphabet and the digraphs ch and ts. This system is easily recognisable because it represents the aspiration of plosives with the apostrofe ‘. Therefore, it distinguishes the unaspirated plosive pa from the aspirated plosive pa’. Despite this effort for precision, users often omitted the apostrophe, thus producing a considerable ambiguity. Why? Try to read the place name t’aich’ich’üan.
This extensive use of this system, specially by Western media in China and learners of Chinese, is responsible for the generalisation of some proper names, like Mao Tse-tung, instead of the current form Mao Zedong, or Teng Hsiao-p’ing for Deng Xiaoping. Wade-Giles transcriptions are still common in the transcriptions of names and surnames in Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities, like the Chinese surnames Chang or Hsü, written as Zhang and Xu in the hanyu pinyin used in Continental China. Among the differences between the Wade-Giles romanisation and pinyin, we can note:
Tones are indicated by adding the tone number to the right of the vowel (ma3)
The use of p t k for unaspirated plosives, and apostrophes for aspiration
Hs instead of X
j instead of r
ung instead of ong
-ien instead of -ian
chih, ch'ih, shih y jih instead of zhi, chi, shi y ri
tzŭ (o tsŭ), tz'ŭ (o ts'ŭ) y ssŭ (o szŭ) instead of zi, ci
ü represents the rounded high front vowel [y]
Yale Romanization
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh
These are some of the characteristics of Gwoyeu Romatzyh:
Like pinyin, it represents the difference of aspirated / unaspirated with the pairs b/p, d/t, g/k, instead of the apostrophe used in Wade Gilles
Use of tz, ts, instead of pinyin’s z, c
Use of ch for pinyin’s ch, and j for pinyin’s zh
pinyin’s j,q,x → j, ch, sh (like in Wade Gilles and Yale, palatal fricatives are presented as allophones of retroflex consonants when followed by a palatal vowel, much like in English and most Romance languages)
iou, uei, uen are wholly represented (pinyin’s iu, ui, un)
pinyin’s ü is represented by iu
Empty rhyme is represented as y: tsy, tzy, chy, jy, sy, shy, ry (instead of ci, zi, chi, zhi, si, shi, ri)
Rotization of Beijing dialect represented as l (instead of r, which is used for marking the second tone)
Tonal orthography: tones are indicated by combination of letters, not by diacritics: bä, bá, bâ, bà → ba, bar baa, bah (In syllables starting with m,n,l,r the basic form represents more frequent the second tone)
Western names maintain their original orthography
Tongyong pinyin
With the meaning of “universal fonetization”, this system replaced Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II in 1986, in a quest to find a simpler system. It is quite similar to its communist brother hanyu pinyin, which suggests a political motivation of differentiating from Mainland China. Developed in 1998, it became the official romanization system of Taiwan, until it was replaced by pinyin in 2009. In spite of this, examples of Tongyong pinyin can still be found in some old signs, like in the metro or in shops. Indeed, today in Taipei, examples of Tongyon pinyin coexist with other transcription systems, to the point that the same place is transcribed in different ways in traffic panels. Here you will find more information about the inconsistency of romanisation in Taiwan public signs.
Some of its characteristics of Tongyon pinyin are the following:
Use of c, s, jh instead of pinyin q, x, zh
Use of ih for the empty rhyme in si, shi, ci, zi, chi, zhi, ri (sih, shih, cih, zih, chih, zhih, rih)
Pinyin’s nasal /e/ is represented as <u>, and velarised nasal /e/ as ,<o>: wen → wun, while weng, feng → wong, fong
-iong is replaced bu -yong: xiong → syong
iou and uei are represented as such: ui → uei, iu → iou
yu replaces ü
Latinxua sin wenz
Latinxua sin wenz (‘new latinized writing’) was the phonetic transcription system based in the latin alphabet that was promoted by the Communist Party in its early years, as opposed to the Nationalist’s system Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Originally created in the URSS and widely used by Chinese communities of immigrants, it represented not only the Beijing variety of Mandarin, but incorporated other dialects, and counted with a variety of publications. Its main default was not to represent the tones, but deducting them from context instead. Some of its features were retained for the development of hanyu pinyin, like the use of letters c, z and digraphs zh, ch. Some characteristics of this system are the following:
Use of c, z for unaspirated and aspirated ts (Wade Gilles: ts)
Use of x, g, k with all vowels, including palatal vowels i, ü (pinyin’s x, j, q)
Use of c, z for syllables with empty rhyme (pinyin’s ci, zi)
Tones are unmarked
Respect of Western original orthography for proper names (e.g.: latin instead of lading)
If the foregin Wade-Gilles system had not gained enough popularity in a country that aimed to redefine its identity, the failure in the adoption of the originally communist Latinxua sin wenz may be due to the revolutionary zeal of its promoters, who aimed to replace sinograms, instead of being just an auxiliary system. Nevertheless, a number of books and newspapers were published with this system.
Hanyu Pinyin
After Chinese Civil War in 1949, the creators of Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Latinxua sin wenz worked together to perfect a transcription system based in the latin alphabet, and the pronunciation from Beijing, the Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an ‘Chinese Phonetic Model’. After a moment of relative abandonment during the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976), it received wide official support, to the point that in 1978, it legally replaced the Wade-Gilles system in the latin transcription of proper names of people and places. As a consequence, Mao Tse-Tung became Mao Zedong, and Peking became Beijing. In 1978, the United Nations adopted pinyin for transcriptions of toponyms and anthroponyms, and it became an international standard in 1982. Some of its particularities are the following ones:
It distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated stops, not with an apostrophe, like Wade-Gilles, but as different letters: b/p, d/t, g/k
Palatals are represented as j, q and x, followed by i and ü (represented as <u> but pronounced as a rounded palatal /y/)
To mark syllable boundaries, i and u are represented as yi and wu when they constitute a syllable head without a previous consonant (wei instead of uei)
Equally, when it constitutes a syllable, ü is written as yu (yue instead of üe)
When a or o form a single syllable, the apostrophe (‘) marks the syllable boundary, like Tian’anmen, Xi’an
Triphthongs like /iou/, /uei/ and /uen/ are transcribed as <iu>, <iou> and <un>, when are preceded by a consonant (<dui> is pronounced /duei/)
French EFEO system
During the French colonisation of Indochina, the French government created the French School of the Far East (École française d'Extrême-Orient, EFEO) in Hanoi to study and research on Asian archeology and philology. This institution created in 1902 a system for the romanisation of Chinese, known as EFEO Chinese transcription. As it happened with the romanizations made by French missionaries, the orthography is adapted to the French system (using ou for high back /u/ and u for high front /y/), and it reflects an older state of pronunciation before some late changes in Chinese (the so-called jian-tuan merger). Instead of focusing in the pronunciation from Beijing, it was based in a more general norm that could include the pronunciation of some Chinese dialects You can compare the transcriptions of Hanyu pinyin (HYPY), Tongyong pinyin (TYPY, EFEO and Zhuyin Fuhao (ZYFH, alias Bopomofo) here:
New (chinese-based) scripts
Guanhua Zimu
The first half of the 20th century assisted a proliferation of phonetic transcription systems in China, ranging from mere auxiliary systems to help learning and reading Chinese characters, to proposals that aimed to replace them. The first one of these systems was invented in 1892 by Lu Zhuangzhang to transcribe Southern Min from Amoy, known today as Xiamen. It was inspired by Japanese furigana, (kana, or syllabaries katakana and hiragana) used for transcribing Kanji, or “Chinese” characters used in Japanese.
Among these transcriptions with a non-latin alphabet, the most successful one was Guanhua Zimu (Mandarin Letters). Published in 1900, it followed this same Japanese technique of inventing phonetic symbols out of stylized Chinese characters. This system aimed to coexist with Chinese writing, with a similar use as in Japan, and was quite successful, being adapted to transcribe the pronunciation of other Chinese languages and used in a number of published books. In spite of this initial success, from 1918, another system would be preferred, the Zhuyin Fuhao, which would become the first official phonetic system of the Republic of China.
Zhuyin Fuhao, aka Bopomofo
Known initially as zhuyin zimu, ‘phonetic alphabet’, this system was promoted as the officially system for phonetic transcription, and, just as the world “Alphabet”, it came to be designated by the first letters of the system: Bo-po-mo-fo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ). In the first years of its existence, it aimed to represent Northern Mandarin, the norm from Beijing, and Southern Mandarin, the norm from Nanjing, incorporating symbols for characteristics of the southern variety like the entering tone. Nevertheless, from 1932, the Beijing pronunciation became the only norm, and these southern particularities were abandoned.
Zhuyin Fuhao, or Bopomofo was widely used in reference works and learning books through the 30s, 40s and 50s, until the Communist Party, founded in 1949, decided in 1958 to replace it by another phonetic system that relied on latin characters, called hanyu pinyin. Nevertheless, the passage from one auxiliary system to another was done smoothly, coexisting for several years, and thus respecting the practise of the elders, who had learnt bopomofo. Today, Bomopofo is the official auxiliary system in use in Taiwan, where it is extensively used in children’s books. Curiously, many of these books are exported to Hong Kong, where traditional characters (i.e.: non-simplified) are also in use, although Hong Kong readers do not understand Bopomofo. If you are learning Bopomofo, you can train yourself here.
C. Other systems
The systems presented above are tools that in some moment attempted to transliterate the pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. But some alphabetic systems were also created for other Chinese languages, like one of the most widespread alphabetization for Cantonese, the Jyutping. In Hong Kong, Jyutping coexists with the Yale romanisation, the HK Government Cantonese Romanisation, and, due to the bilingual character of the territory, asystematic English-based transcriptions used in informal use, like the use of <oo> fir the sound /u/. You can automatically generate Jyutping from Chinese characters in this site.
At the end of Qing dynasty, a scholar called Lu Zhuangzhang, from Fujian, studied the missionary’s alfabetic systems made for Southern Min languages of Fujian (specifically, the varieties of the cities of Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou), and in 1892 developed his own improved system or romanization, called Qieyin Xinzi. This endeavour inspired many scholars, and more than 25 new phonetic alphabets were created subsequently in 1982, for the Min languages as well as for Mandarin Chinese. These systems are known as qieyin systems. After the fall of Qing dynasty, under the Beiyang government (1912 - 1928) Lu Zhuangzhang also contributed to the creation of a phonetic system based on Chinese characters, Jiyin Zimu, that would eventually give birth to Bopomofo.
One of the languages that received early attention from Europeans is Hokkien (Dictionary of Hokkien, 1820). The romanisation invented by missionaries for transcribing this language, known as early church romanization, was developed in 1930 to account for the Hokkien varieties of Taiwan and Amoy (Xiamen), with the name of Pèh-oe-ji or Church Romanization. In Taiwan, the lifting of martial law in 1987 saw a revitalization of the island’s languages that led to the development of this romanisation system that came to be denominated Tâi-lô. Promoted by the Taiwanese government from 2006, its similitude with the Vietnamese system of romanisation chữ Quốc ngữ , can explained by their common origin.
Among all the varieties of Mandarin, a dialect of Southwestern Mandarin (aka Upper Yangtze Mandarin) , Sichuanese, has been transcribed in its own system. Sichuanese is indeed quite widespread (around 100 millions of speakers), being used as lingua franca by some ethnic minorities. Although some sources estimate its degree of intelligibility with Standard Mandarin in 50%, its phonetic system is nevertheless too different from Mandarin for hanyu pinyin to be successfully employed. For this reason, Sichuanese pinyin was created from the Chengdu- Chongqing dialect (aka Cheng–Yu), and is used mainly for Sichuanese dictionaries and linguistic studies. Just as the Yale system, it represents tones with numbers after every syllable. The following table can give you an idea of the difference between Sichuanese pinyin and hanyu pinyin:
Rubi characters
The term rubi or ruby does not designate a writing system, but the auxiliary use of a (eastern Asian) language system for glossing purposes. Ruby characters constitute therefore a phonetic gloss in smaller size that accompanies an inscription or text written in a non phonetic system. They are usually placed over the original text when written horizontally, and to the right when written vertically. They are often used in works addressed to a public that may have an insufficient knowledge of a non-phonetic system like Chinese or Japanese. It is often found in Japan, Mainland China and Taiwan in comics, books for children and students of Chinese or Japanese as a foreign language.
Rubi characters can represent any phonetic writing system. For instance, in Japan, rubi characters may be written in hiragana, katakana or romaji; in Taiwan, they may have the form of Zhuyin (alias Bopomofo) among others, and in Mainland China, you will probably find a pinyin gloss. For Korean, Chinese characters can be glossed with rubi characters with the Korean syllabary Hangul or its romanization Romaja, while Vietnamese speakers (mainly Gin people, Vietnamese living in China), will use their latin alphabet Quoc Ngu.
Rubi characters may be used for a diversity of reasons: firstly, to clarify a character that is rare or unknown to the intended reader; and secondly, to specify the intended pronunciation of a character that has more than one pronunciation or that is used with a non standard one. Besides, they can also be used to convey the meaning, instead of the pronunciation, of an unknown word (a foreign word or slang term).
These practises are more common for Japanese than for Chinese, since in Japanese, many characters may have two or more different pronunciations: the native Japanese kun’yomi or the Chinese loan on’yomi. Japanese rubi characters, known as furigana or yomigana, are also called tategaki when written vertically, and yokogaki when horizontally. Another frequent use of rubi characters in Japanese is the expression of puns and double meanings. Since kanji convey meaning and rubi presents the pronunciation, both systems can be combined to invent a term with a double meaning, where one meaning completes the other. For instance, in a science-fiction work, a human far from the Earth may refer to it by using the kanji for Earth and the rubi-furigana for “my hometown”.
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