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March 8, 2014 |
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Zh?yīn F?h?o (注音符號), or "Symbols for Annotating Sounds", often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) for the first four syllables of these Chinese language|Chinese phonetic symbols, is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (based on Taiwan) for teaching the Chinese languages, especially Standard Mandarin, to people learning to read and write and/or to people learning to speak Mandarin. (See #Uses|Uses). The system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 vowels. There is a one symbol-one sound correspondence. The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Woo Tsin-hang from 1912 to 1913|13, created a system called Guoyin Zimu (國音字母 "National Pronunciation Letters") or Zhuyin Zimu (註音字母 or 注音字母 "Sound-annotating Letters") which is based on Zhang Binglin's shorthands. (For differences with the Zhang system, see Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation#Phonetic symbols.) A draft was released on July 11, 1913 by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education, but it was not officially proclaimed until November 23, 1918. Zhuyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao in April 1930. The ROC Education Ministry has attempted for many years to phase out the use of Zhuyin in favor of a system based on Roman characters (see MPS II). However, this transition has been extremely slow due to the difficulty in teaching elementary school teachers a new Roman-based system. There was no official document explaining the details of the origins of the characters, but they are apparent if you understand some basic Chinese characters. The zhuyin symbols are mainly fragments of characters that contain the sound that each symbol represents. For example:
A few were made by adding additional strokes, for example:
A few are virtually identical to Chinese characters still in use, for example:
Many are nearly entirely identical to radical (Chinese character)|radicals with the same sounds, for example:
Other symbols, mostly vowel symbols, are based entirely or partly on obsolete variants of characters, for example:
There are still others that are totally unlike any known symbols, but were designed to look like, and be written in the same style as, Chinese chacacters. The zhuyin characters usually are represented in typographic typeface|fonts as if drawn with an ink brush (as in Regular Script). These phonetic symbols sometimes appear as ruby characters printed next to the Chinese characters in young children's books, and in editions of classical texts (which frequently use characters that appear at very low frequency rates in newspapers and other such daily fare). One seldom sees these symbols used in mass media adult publications except as a pronunciation guide (or index system) in dictionary entries. Bopomofo symbols are also mapped to the ordinary Roman character keyboard (1 = bo, q = po, a = mo, and so forth) used in one Chinese input methods for computers| method for inputting Chinese text when using the computer. Unlike pinyin, the sole purpose for zhuyin in elementary education is to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation to children. Grade one textbooks of all subjects (including Mandarin) are entirely in zhuyin. After that year, Chinese character texts are given in annotated form. Around grade four, presence of zhuyin annotation is greatly reduced, remaining only in the new character section. School children learn the symbols so that they can decode pronunciations given in a Chinese dictionary, and also so that they can find how to write words for which they know only the sounds. Pinyin, on the other hand, is dual-purpose. Besides being a pronunciation notation, pinyin is used widely in publications in mainland China. Some books from mainland China are published purely in pinyin with not even a single Chinese character. Those books are targeted to Chinese minority|minority tribal groups or Western world|Westerners who know spoken Mandarin but have not yet learned written Chinese characters. Zhuyin will probably never replace Traditional Chinese just as hiragana has never replaced characters in Japanese texts even though it substituting hiragana for characters is always an option. Not only are the characters valued for esthetic and other axiological reasons, but (once they have been learned) reading characters required fewer eye fixations and eliminates the ambiguities in any alphabetic or syllabic writing system caused by the immense number of homonyms in Chinese. (Reading Chinese in a phonetic representation is like trying to understand a spoken English sentence containing a string of homonyms such as: "For afore Forry called four 'Fores!'..." because almost any spelled-out "word" maps to more than one Chinese character. In English, we use different spellings of one sound such as "for" to differentiate the intended meanings. In zhuyin -- minus the word "called" -- that would look something like the following ㄈㄡㄦ ㄚㄈㄡㄦㄈㄡㄦㄧ... ㄈㄡㄦ ㄈㄡㄦㄗ.) Zhuyin is also used to write some of the aboriginal languages of Taiwan. For these it is a primary writing system, not an ancillary system as it is for Chinese. Image:tone_mark_comparative_chart.png|right|graphic version of the tone marks Zhuyin symbols are written like Chinese characters, including the general order of strokes and positioning. They are always placed to the right of the Chinese characters, whether the characters are arranged vertically or horizontally. Technically, these are Ruby characters. Very rarely do they appear on top of Chinese characters when written horizontally as furigana would be written above kanji in a Japanese text. Because a syllable block contains usually two or three Zhuyin symbols (which themselves fit in a square format) stacked on top of each other, the blocks are rectangular. The Standard Mandarin#Tones|tone marks are similar to the later developed Pinyin#Tones|Pinyin tone symbols, except that the first tone has no symbolization at all, and the neutral tone appears as a black dot. The neutral dot is the only mark to be placed on top of the vertical Zhuyin syllable block, the remaining three are in a vertical strip to the right of the character. The tone marks are sometimes given in Regular Script style, matching the associated Chinese characters, and have the same basic shape as do those of the pinyin tone symbols. However, they vary in detail. The thickened end of Zhuyin's second (rising) tone is always at the lower left, whereas the second tone mark in the pinyin system is a straight line of uniform width. The third tone mark displays the greatest variation. Zhuyin's tone symbolization was used in the ROC-sponsored romanizations created by the Mandarin Promotion Council. The tone symbols in that system were identical with the zhuyin tone symbols, except that they were not in Regular Style calligraphy, but in a Western font face and so resemble the tone symbols used in pinyin. Zhuyin and Pinyin are based on the same Mandarin pronunciations, hence there is a mostly 1-to-1 mapping between the two systems. In the table below, the 'zhuyin' and 'pinyin' columns show equivalency.
Dialect letters used to write sounds not found in Standard Mandarin (not many web browsers can display these glyphs, see #External links for Portable Document Format|PDF pictures.) The table should be read left-to-right, row-by-row, not column-by-column.
Extended Bopomofo for Min-nan and Hakka dialect|Hakka
Category:Alphabetic writing systems eo:Bopomofo fr:Bopomofo id:Bopomofo ja:注音符号 pl:Bopomofo zh:注音符號 This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Zhuyin".
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