Talk:Pinyin

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Contents 1 Can't see/get 3rd tone mark 2 Ambiguity in table 2.1 ========= 3 Some Thoughts on Content and Usability Issues for Article Revision 4 Finding this page 5 Capitalization 6 Move? 7 Wikipedia PinYin-ization project 8 Pinyin reasoning 9 Special characters--where are they? 10 say jingle bells, not ajar 11 Shanxi vs Shaanxi spelling 12 The article needs a history of pinyin section 13 [aʊ] 14 final -r 15 Question 16 Pinyin for transcribing minority languages 17 Internet Explorer Crashing 18 Lead section 19 Appropriateness of Pinyin for Standard Written Chinese 20 Books and websites in pinyin? 21 this section does not apply to mandarin..? 22 b & g compared to Western p & k 23 external resource missing 24 Mysterious /ɰ/ Phoneme in Standard Mandarin Article 25 Good Article Review

[edit] Can't see/get 3rd tone mark

I am trying to use Pinyin "u" with 3rd tone mark (inverted circumflex/caron) in the tofu article but this character doesn't seem to appear below in the list of many different diacritic characters. Also, whenever such characters appear in the Pinyin article I only see a box. Does anyone know if this bug will be worked out soon? It seems like an important thing, as Chinese is the most widely spoken language. Badagnani 22:50, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

I still cannot see "u" and some other letters with 3rd tone mark on my computer. Can someone help me to update my computer so that I can see these diacritics? Thank you. Badagnani 19:54, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I cannot read the symbols within the parentheses (in large font) in the "Tones" section of the Pinyin article; they show up simply as empty boxes. I've posted a couple of times already but have so far received no answer or help. Any help that anyone could provide so that I may update my computer so that I can see these diacritics would be greatly appreciated. I think if I am having this problem with these diacritics, others around the world must as well, yet no recommendation for fonts to download is provided on the Pinyin page. Can someone please address this? Badagnani 08:03, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

I am not sure if this is it, but try to install (link removed). -- G.S.K.Lee 23:20, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for this--I will try it. I have determined that those large characters in the "Tones" section are the letter "a" without the loop at the top, with various tone marks. I was advised by another Wikipedia editor to use Netscape instead of IE and, lo and behold, I could indeed read those characters with Netscape. That doesn't seem a very good fix, though, as whatever we do here should be viewable to all, regardless of browser. An editor a week or so ago pointed out that the letter "a" in Pinyin does *not* need to be the style of "a" without loop at the top, so those parenthetical "a"s are probably unnecessary anyway. Badagnani 03:31, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Actually this was caused by somebody forcing the text to 'Arial MS Unicode' when in fact the font is called 'Arial Unicode MS'. I have changed it to use the Unicode template instead. —Moilleadóir 06:13, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for this; I have just checked and everything appears properly now. Badagnani 06:27, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguity in table

For the [i] entry in the table the description reads, "like English "ee", except when preceded by "c", "ch", "r", "s", "sh", "z" or "zh"; in these cases it should be pronounced as a natural extension of those sounds in the same position, but slightly more open to allow for a clear-sounding vowel to pass through"

OK, but which vowel? --Tydaj 01:41, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

I've been sounding these syllables out for days now, and have yet to come up with any verbal description that could describe these sounds. You just have to hear it. Maybe some Chinese textbook for beginners has a good description; does anyone have such a book, and if so, what does it say about how to pronounce these syllables? Is it possible to upload sound clips? Badagnani 03:34, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a syllabic alveolar approximant (after z, c, s) or syllabic retroflex approximant (after zh, ch, sh, r). In the case of "ri", it's almost as if there's just one vowel: a syllabic retroflex approximant. -- ran (talk) 03:56, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

I can't find anywhere how to represent that final -i in IPA. In Li & Thompson table 1.4, transcriptions are given which are not even on the IPA chart! 219.87.12.250 09:47, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that these two vowels are usually given as [ ɿ ] and [ ʅ ] in publications that ostensibly use IPA, but this is not official IPA usage:

Pinyin	zi	ci	si	zhi	chi	shi
IPA	tsz̩	tsʰz̩	sz̩	tʂʐ̩	tʂʰʐ̩	ʂʐ̩
non-standard "IPA"	tsz̩ɿ	tsʰɿ	sɿ	tʂʅ	tʂʰʅ	ʂʅ

These symbols are used in most publications dealing with Sino-Tibetan languages. — Babelfisch 06:40, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Now that I think about it, maybe we should keep with the tradition, and use these symbols as well. We should also start separate articles to explain what these are. -- ran (talk) 11:55, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm certainly in favour of using those symbols, in line with the sino-linguistic community, but I think a small note to explain them would be sufficient, not separate articles (unless all IPA and non-IPA phonetic symbols have their own articles). There are also non-standard-IPA symbols for the rounded versions of [ ɿ ] and [ ʅ ]. — Babelfisch 01:26, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! Do you think you could place it on the following vowel chart? As you will see there is already a vowel on it that has no IPA symbol.

--Tydaj 04:39, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] =========

As this is a non-specialist environment I would strongly recommend you stick to IPA and nothing but IPA. One set of incomprehensible squiggly marks is more than enough for laymen. An entirely separate article on the subject of specialized phonetic symbols used in Sino-Tibetanology would be fascinating.

If you absolutely must, you can use IPA diacritics on the cardinal IPA vowels to get the exact representation you want in strict IPA.

But the cardinal IPA vowels are almost never exactly even the phoneme you intend in any given language, let alone the allophone. Every single basic vowel in American English needs IPA diacritics added to the cardinal vowel to represent it at all accurately -- and no one ever does that. How exact a representation do Wikipedia readers need of your Chinese sound?

[edit] Some Thoughts on Content and Usability Issues for Article Revision

1. Make GIFs of all IPA symbols (and Chinese characters) -- many users are seeing "??" everywhere.

2. Regarding zh -- is the IPA Retroflex Approximate really the same as the Voiced Retroflex Fricative, or is there some friction missing?

3. The Finals chart is cruel and inscrutible to anyone not familiar with Chinese syllable thinking. It needs explanations of the "zero" sign (which should really not be used as it looks just like an IPA symbol BTW) and schwa used in the Nucleus column, and then explanations of what is happening with those very unexpected and unpredictable phonetic and spelling changes that occur when the elements are combined.

4. In "Rules given in terms of English pronunciation", are these Aveolo-Palatals really getting "passed backwards along my tongue"? Can't I pass them with the dutchy on the lefthand side instead? Is there not something still going on in the aveolar region, and do I need a complete lexicon of Portugese at this moment? And many other complaints about inexactitude and rambling throughout. What is always lacking and always needed in phonetic "description" is specific instructions: "Raise the middle of your tongue to here. Raise the tip of your tongue to here. Do this with your jaw and lips. Do this with your breath and vocal cords." -- 66.81.221.246, 8 November 2005

ad 1. No GIFs, please. Getting a browser to display Chinese characters and IPA in Unicode is not such a big problem, and GIF's would be a nightmare: people who can input Chinese and IPA can do so fairly quickly, and people who can't won't be able to deal with the GIFs either. Besides that, GIFs take much longer to load and won't fit in with the rest of the text.

ad 3. I agree, the chart is not perfect. The problem is that the symbols used in the grey boxes are a mixture of Pinyin (ng) and IPA ([y]). That's confusing.

ad 4. I'm not a big fan of "rules given in terms of English pronunciation", because without linguistic training, monolingual English speakers won't be able to use them anyways. — Babelfisch 01:27, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

With regards to point 1, I agree that we should not replace the unicode with GIFs. GIFs are rather unwieldy to handle in this context. It's also become a very straight forward process to enable the display of East Asian character sets these days. --BenjaminTsai ^Talk 14:17, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Finding this page

The term pinying is sometimes used. Is this incorrect?

Anyway, I put in a redirect from Pinying. Singkong2005 04:52, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, "Pinying" is absolutely wrong. The difference between -n and -ng is crucial in most Chinese dialects, but not all of them. The source of this mistake is either complete ignorance of non-Chinese speakers, or dialect influence of Chinese speakers. — Babelfisch 05:48, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I've added Template:R from misspelling. -- ran (talk) 07:59, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization

Should "pinyin" be written in upper case or lower case? It appears both ways in this article. Badagnani 03:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Pinyin does not need to be capitalized. However when spelling it out as "Hanyu Pinyin", it needs to be capitalized. --BenjaminTsai ^Talk 14:10, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Move?

To make more explicit that this article is on Hanyu Pinyin and not Tongyong Pinyin and clear any possible confusion, I propose that this page be moved to "Hanyu Pinyin". Comments? --Jiang 07:33, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

• Sounds good. --BenjaminTsai ^Talk 08:14, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
• Good idea. -- A human 08:16, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
• against. The great majority in readers will just know the name pinyin and will never have heard of either hanyu or tongyong. So its better to have a pinyin article that describes the most common version of pinyin and possibly indicate and refer to the other one. −Woodstone 10:17, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
  • If the article is moved to "Hanyu Pinyin", then "pinyin" will most likely contain/redirect to Pinyin (disambiguation). This should take care of the issue you're pointing out, but I can understand your perspective and actually look somewhat favorably on it because of my bias against Tongyong Pinyin. ;-) --BenjaminTsai ^Talk 10:37, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
• Either keep it as it is, or redirect Pinyin to Hanyu Pinyin, with a disambiguation notice to bring readers to Tongyong Pinyin and Postal System Pinyin. — Instantnood 21:56, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
• Support move and redirect from "pinyin" to "Hanyu Pinyin". --MarkSweep (call me collect) 07:09, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose move. The only pinyin most English speakers (and Chinese learners) know is Hanyu Pinyin. The Tongyong system came much later, and is partly based on the Hanyu system; give it its own article under "Tongyong pinyin" and leave Hanyu Pinyin as Pinyin. Badagnani 08:03, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Hanyu Pinyin is often referred to by its full name. The zh wikipedia has the article at 汉语拼音 with 拼音 redirecting to 汉语拼音. I propose we do the same (so Hanyu Pinyin will retain precedence): move this article to "Hanyu Pinyin", redirect "Pinyin" to "Hanyu Pinyin" and leave a dab note at the top "Pinyin redirects here. For other uses, see Tongyong Pinyin and Postal System Pinyin". Users looking for pinyin without the Hanyu will still be redirected to the article they are seeking. --Jiang 08:15, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose move. For the vast majority of people Pinyin is Hanyu pinyin. Typing Pinyin in the search box should lead directly to Pinyin article. LDHan 09:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
  • That's what redirects are for. Typing in "pinyin" would still redirect to Hanyu Pinyin as User:Jiang suggested. — Indi ^{[ talk ]} 14:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
• Support move and redirect per User:Instantnood. (I hope it's not too late to vote now) — Indi ^{[ talk ]} 14:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose. Tongyong and Postal pinyin are not even remotely close to the original system in terms of usage, recognition and notability. It's an issue that only concerns Chinese Wikipedia. The deference shown to non-PRC issues is exaggerated as it is. / Peter ^Isotalo 08:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia PinYin-ization project

I propose to make a project to standardize all Wikipedia articles with mainland-chinese terms to PinYin. Except names that originates in romanizations not in chinese characters. What do you people think?? In hundred years it will all be in Pinyin why not face it and standardize now?? A human 08:15, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I have also thought about this issue, and I definitely agree with you. In fact, I saw a new book today, The Complete History of China, which is a big tome by J.A.G. Roberts. In this book, all Chinese names are in Pinyin, even names of such historical personalities as Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Soong May-ling, are converted to Pinyin, and the three names are thus respectively, Sun Zhongshan, Jiang Jieshi, and Song Meiling.

Although history made those spelling, but there is more time in the future than in the past, and Wikipedia is a long-term project and should promote this standard, which will do a great service to all the people in the time to come. Following this standard, peole with minimal knowledge of the Chinese language and culture can uniquely convert a Chinese name into the Romanized form and find it in Wikipedia. Otherwise, they would have to try many different forms.

Technically, we can let the standard Pinyin appear in the title, and REDIRECT other non-standard forms to the standard entry.

These non-standard forms for Chinese names due to historical reasons, personal idiosyncrasies, and sometimes due to lack of proper information, cause enormous inconveniences in dealing with Chinese names either in Sinological studies or in daily life. It does not make any sense to let such unnecessary problems continue. --Roland 09:19, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

it should be always up to wikipedia:use common names. it is only when it is not clear what spelling is more common that we favor pinyin based on the importance of this romanization system. for example, Kung fu is much more common in English than Gongfu.--Jiang 08:34, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I am about to start such a project. Please read List of proposed projects 亮HH 16:06, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I Also disagree. I Think it should be left up to the original authors and contributors of the article, as the guideline suggests. I think that using all Hanyu pinyin would be a good idea, but for things like pronouciation, and different wording (電腦 vs 計算機), those should be left to the author to decide. You could also offer multiple wordings or pronouciations, but i think that would only be appropriate if it is relevant to the content of the article.--Keith 23:02, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Disagree, as per comment by Keith above. Keep it on an article-by-article basis, as stated in the guidelines. The Pinyin should be listed in the first paragraph of the article in any case, if the title is not in pinyin. Badagnani 02:07, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pinyin reasoning

Why do it the way Pinyin is? Why not just accept the Internation Phonetic Alphabet? That way even more people would be able to understand it. Does anyone how they came up with/created Pinyin? 70.111.224.85 01:22, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Could you give us some examples? For instance, how will you spell the names of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), Mao Zedong, or Zhang Ziyi in Internation Phonetic Alphabet in the English context? --Roland 09:23, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Special characters--where are they?

Does anyone know what happened to the selection of "Special characters" below the edit screen, for use to insert into articles while editing (including vowels with pinyin tone marks)? They are mostly not there any more, and nobody responds on the various "help" pages where I have asked about this. Maybe if more people start to ask, whoever removed these will replace them so we can get back to work. Badagnani 08:24, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The pinyin characters can now be found in the drop down menu just below the edit screen. Drop down to "Pinyin" to get the tone marks. Badagnani 09:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] say jingle bells, not ajar

For the j example, say "as in jingle bells" or just jingle, instead of ajar. I recall this is closer theoretically.210.200.105.227 21:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Shanxi vs Shaanxi spelling

How about including a short reference to this special case under miscellanea? Maybe something like "A special case exists regarding the spelling of two neighboring provinces (山西 Shānxī; 陕西 Shǎnxī) whose pronunciation are almost identical except for the tone of the first syllable. The common practice of omitting tone marks therefore renders the two names identical, so to address this ambiguity, the names are spelt Shanxi and Shaanxi respectively, unless if written with tone marks." Infohunter 17:40, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Found some reference about this. Chinese government seems to follow this rule:

• http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/43602.htm
• http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/43599.htm

There's a short remark on the Shaanxi page. Talamus 14:30, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The article needs a history of pinyin section

It doesn't say where pinyin came from, who was the guiding light behind it, who decided it needed to be invented, political considerations behind its adoption, and so on. For instance, the Russian influence on pinyin via Latinxua Sinwenz might also help explain the non-standard use of Roman letters referred to in the text. ProhibitOnions 11:55, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] [aʊ]

Why is [aʊ] written as ao instead of au? — Instantnood 20:23, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess this is because [ʊ] and [o] are very similar sounds. For example, the German diphthong /au/ is analyzed as [aʊ] by some, but as [ao] by others (and this implies no distinction of varieties of any kind). 84.73.159.74 08:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] final -r

Is final -r retroflex? I've heard that its sound is clearly distinct from initial r-, but on this page, the same IPA transcription is used for both sounds. 84.73.159.74 08:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

---

I've copied this in from the Standard Mandarin article for the chart footnote:

/ɻ/ is often transcribed as [ʐ] (a voiced retroflex fricative). This represents a variation in pronunciation among different speakers, rather than two different phonemes.

The distinction in sound between these two is very subtle. I've never seen a mention of a distinct final R sound, but I think (and I'm such the non-expert in these matters I warn you) that in Beijing dialect the final R does alter something in pronunciation of the word, but it's not the R itself that changes... (?)

For that matter, this page simply states as a fact that final -r is written in pinyin, but http://www.pinyin.info/romanization/compare/hanyu.html does not show any sign of this, and the Microsoft Pinyin IME knows nothing of it. Perhaps the page needs to discuss?

[edit] Question

Hi, we need Chinese language help at Chinese wine. There's a wine which isn't yet discussed that is sold as "hung-lu" wine. It is reddish in color, a sharp smell, and a chemically, diesel-like taste, and is sold by the Oriental Mascot brand (which also makes mijiu and formerly also made Shaoxing jiu). The largest photo of this wine is here, but the characters aren't easily readable. I think "hung-lu" isn't Hanyu pinyin. Can someone provide information about this wine, the characters, etc.? Thank you! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0000DJZ0F/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/102-4042702-9901704?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=3370831&s=gourmet-food Badagnani 19:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 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)

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)

[edit] Internet Explorer Crashing

Something between Traditional Characters and Numbers in place of Tone Marks in the Tones section of this article makes my Internet Explorer crash every single time. Does this happen to anybody else? Anybody know of a possible reason for this?

I remember looking at the different kinds of "ma"'s before, which I see in the source code is present in the section that makes my Internet Explorer crash, so either the article changed to make it crash, or the program itself changed. I'm going to guess the first option. BirdValiant 01:10, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

I just checked the Pinyin page and the very same thing happened to me. I scrolled down to where the big "a"s with tone marks are and my Internet Explorer crashed -- for the first time ever, in all my time using Wikipedia. Let's get this fixed, please. Badagnani 03:27, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't have that problem, but I have to go through a proxy because of Chinese government censorship, and I use the Chinese version of IE 6.0. —Babelfisch 05:38, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

All fine using Firefox... -- G.S.K.Lee 15:10, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

yup, happening to me too. every time i try to scroll past "tones" section

Let's please fix this! I proposed this on 18 May 2006 and there has been no response. The person who introduced the new code (whatever that is) that is making this happen is the person who needs to fix it. Please chime in if you are that person and make the repair. Thanks. Badagnani 21:16, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lead section

It is perfectly fine to begin the lead section with the more specific, technical, or official term, like how United States begins with "United States of America" and Bill Clinton begins with "William Jefferson Clinton". I don't see why the article needs to begin with "Pinyin". --Jiang 17:13, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Simply because a great majority of the readers will be suprised to see the well known transcription method suddenly have an unfamiliar name. −Woodstone 17:39, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the validity in your point, that readers will be "suprised". I'm fine with the current text as it is neither misleading nor inaccurate, but I don't see the precedent in Wikipedia for this funnel-shaped lead section approach. The standard is to start with the definition in bold face and let any disambiguation headers do their job. "Pinyin" can be a stand alone term in all appearances in the article after the first, except the part on comparison with other systems- this should make it obvious enough. Just because most people do not know about Madonna (entertainer)'s three other names, Louise Veronica Ciccone, does not mean we should purge it from the bolded text. --Jiang 21:10, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Appropriateness of Pinyin for Standard Written Chinese

Under Controversey section, it says:

"The phonotactics of spoken Mandarin dictate a relatively small set of possible syllables resulting in many homophones. Because of this, pinyin can be ambiguous, especially when transcribing Standard Written Chinese, which uses formal constructions not often found in speech."

However, in the article on Vernacular Chinese to which Standard Written Chinese is redirected to, it says that Standard Written Chinese now often refers to Vernacular Chinese which by definition should NOT contain "formal constructions not often found in speech."

Can someone clarify this and/or make the appropriate changes to this section? The way it is stated now, it suggests that pinyin is particularly ambiguous when used for standard Chinese writing. I don't believe this is the case, and it cannot be the case if standard Chinese writing is close to the spoken form, otherwise spoken Chinese would also be highly ambiguous.

Gary 16:51, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Books and websites in pinyin?

Are there any books and magazines printed in pinyin? If so, why not provide information about how to get them in this article?

What about websites? I know it is relatively easy to convert characters to pinyin using the software mentioned in the article, but it would be nice to find some websites that were already in pinyin. Do these not exist?

Gary 17:03, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] this section does not apply to mandarin..?

"For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in Western use of the Latin script. Other letters, like j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in pinyin, such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either."

While in china, i have never confused b with p, or g with k. J and zh sound like the english j, q is like ch, and x is like sh. Does this section apply to non-Mandarin dialects, or is it just incorrect?

68.197.167.243 23:40, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Sure it applies to Mandarin. Pinyin is designed for standard Mandarin, but my Chinese teacher said that it is really intended for the Beijing accent. I agree with you about b/p and g/k, so perhaps that is a matter of opinion, or just a way of expressing that although 'b' is similar to an English 'b' it is not the same. However, the way I say the 'j' 'q' 'x' 'zh', was always either causing words to be misunderstood or just pointed out as being a very poor Chinese accent. She is right in that the tapes (nor her own native accent) don't sound much like my attempts either. She also said that Mandarin speakers from some other parts of China don't distinguish those consonants the way northern speakers do. I am a native English speaker, and I have not travelled to China myself, I am afraid. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Pinyin is expressly for Mandarin. The "Beijing dialect" that you speak of is simply Mandarin. Mandarin is the official language of China, thus, pinyin is a romanized pronunciation for Mandarin.

[edit] b & g compared to Western p & k

The previous version read "For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in Western use of the Latin script". Now I fully understand that this is true for the unaspirated p and k, but those are not the representative forms of p and k pronunciation in English. It is also true if "more closely" means 'at an intermediate value' (e.g., between b and p), but this is clear as mud. The description is therefore misleading, as it will cause the uninitiated to think that the b and g in pinyin are pronounced like an aspirated p and k in English. I have therefore reworded it to 'not as heavily voiced'. Dragonbones 15:29, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Pinyin b and g are both unvoiced and unaspirated, the mistake is to assume "(pinyin) b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in Western use of the Latin script" is talking about English. Pinyin "b" is similar to French "p" eg "Paris". So I have changed it to "For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in some Western uses of the Latin script eg French." LDHan 21:04, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] external resource missing

There is an excellent non-profit website which specializes in educating the public about Hanyu Pinyin, and it should definitely be in the external links list here, but I don't know how to add it because I don't understand the code for the external links. Here is the info: http://www.pinyin.info/

I am very well versed in pinyin, so I can vouch for its quality and the fact that it is not spam. Could someone please help add it? Thanks, Dragonbones 15:41, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. −Woodstone 19:14, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mysterious /ɰ/ Phoneme in Standard Mandarin Article

Would someone please take a look at my Talk question "This Phoneme /ɰ/ is Misclassified, and Does it Really Exist?" in the Standard Mandarin article.

They have a mystery phoneme in their chart there that is not present in the Romanization charts in the Pinyin article here: /ɰ/ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.7.2.131 (talk) 13:26, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Good Article Review

A Good Article review has opened concerning this article concerning these issues at WP:GA/R, please address them in 7 days or the article will be delisted: maintenance of the article has fallen, there are 3 citation needed tags, only one reference, only one note and one spam notice. Rlevse 00:25, 12 December 2006 (UTC)