The Introduction of Chinese Pinyin

The Introduction of Chinese Pinyin

Pinyin is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin, where pin means "spell" and yin means "sound".

The most common variant of pinyin in use is called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音方案; Traditional Chinese: 漢語拼音方案; pinyin: Hànyǔ Pīnyīn fāng'àn), also known as scheme of the Chinese phonetic alphabet ((Simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音; Traditional Chinese: 漢語拼音; pinyin: Hànyǔ Pīnyīn).

Hanyu Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People's Republic of China. It superseded older romanization systems such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1892) and Postal System Pinyin, and replaced Zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. Hanyu Pinyin was adopted in 1979 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the standard romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098:1991). It has also been accepted by the Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions. It has also become a useful tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.

Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization; that is, it uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin will differ from how other languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. 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.

By letting Roman characters refer to specific Chinese sounds, pinyin produces a compact and accurate romanization, which is convenient for native Chinese speakers and scholars. However, it also means that a person who has not studied Chinese or the pinyin system is likely to severely mispronounce words, which is a less serious problem with some earlier romanization systems such as Wade-Giles.