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US Library of
Congress link to Pin Yin:
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/romcover.html
The following notes
are from Wikepedia on Pin Yin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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, also known as scheme of the Chinese
phonetic alphabet.
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 It superseded older romanization systems such as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 Chinese Postal Map Romanization, 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
some Western uses of the Latin script, e.g., French. 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.
The primary purpose of pinyin in Chinese schools is to teach Standard Mandarin
pronunciation. For those Chinese who speak Standard Mandarin at home, pinyin is
used to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already
know; however, for the many Chinese who do not use Standard Mandarin at home,
pinyin is used to teach them the Standard Mandarin pronunciation of words when
they learn them in elementary school.
Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet, hence the pronunciation is relatively
straightforward for Westerners. Pinyin vowels are pronounced similarly to vowels
in Romance languages, and most consonants are similar to English. A pitfall for
English-speaking novices is, however, the unusual pronunciation of x, q, c, zh,
and z (and sometimes i) and the unvoiced pronunciation of d, b, g, and j.
*For more information
and some useful tables containing the pronunciation of all pinyin letters in
terms of English approximations see the
Pin Yin section of Wikipedia.
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