Ĭattaneo's system, with its accounting for the tones, was not lost, however. This work has also been lost but not rediscovered. During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640), compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary as well, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables were indicated with diacritical marks. The dictionary was finally published in 2001. Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934. The first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in Latin alphabet is thought to have been designed in 1583-88 by Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri for their Portuguese-Chinese dictionary - the first ever European-Chinese dictionary. Note the systematic use of x where Pinyin has sh, si where Pinyin has xi, and qu (stylized qv) where Pinyin uses gu Book indexing, dictionary entry sorting, and cataloguing in general.Ī 17th-century European map using the then-typical transcription of Chinese place names.Replacing Chinese characters to bring functional literacy to illiterate Chinese speakers.Recitation of Chinese text in one Chinese variety by literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible one, e.g.行 as xíng (to walk behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store)). Identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context (e.g.Allowing instant communication in "colloquial Chinese" between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book.Transcribing the citation pronunciation of specific Chinese characters according to the pronunciation conventions of a specific European language, to allow the insertion of that Chinese pronunciation into a Western text.Making the syntactic structure of Chinese intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar.Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, especially those with no experience of a tonal language.Teaching spoken and written Chinese to foreigners.Still, the system of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (National Romanization) bypasses the issue of introducing non-letter symbols by changing the letters within the syllable, as in mha, ma, maa, mah, each of which contains the same vowel, but a different tone. Others, like Pinyin, indicate the tone with diacritics: mā, má, mǎ, mà. Certain systems such as Wade-Giles indicate tone with a number following the syllable: ma 1, ma 2, ma 3, ma 4. Tones distinguish the definition of all morphemes in Chinese, and the definition of a word is often ambiguous in the absence of tones. Īside from syllable structure, it is also necessary to indicate tones in Chinese romanization. While the Fanqie system was ideal for indicating the conventional pronunciation of single, isolated characters in written Classical Chinese literature, it was unworkable for the pronunciation of essentially polysyllabic, colloquial spoken Chinese dialects, such as Mandarin. This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie system, and it is the core principle of all modern systems. The Indian Sanskrit grammarians who went to China two thousand years ago to work on the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and the transcription of Buddhist terms into Chinese, discovered the "initial sound", "final sound", and "suprasegmental tone" structure of spoken Chinese syllables. Chinese dictionaries have complex and competing sorting rules for characters and romanization systems simplify the problem by listing characters in their Latin form alphabetically. Romanization facilitates entering characters on standard keyboards such as QWERTY. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation among Chinese speakers who speak mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties. Most broadly, it is used to provide a useful way for foreigners who are not skilled at recognizing Chinese script to read and recognize Chinese. There are many uses for Chinese Romanization. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Mandarin) and Yale Romanization (Mandarin and Cantonese). Linguist Daniel Kane wrote, "It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys." The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists in the 1950s including Zhou Youguang. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. Romanization of Chinese ( Chinese: 中文拉丁化 pinyin: zhōngwén lādīnghuà) is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese.
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