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90-541: Jiefang , generally a spelling without tonemarks of Jiěfàng (Chinese: 解放 ; lit. 'liberation'), may refer to: Jiefang is the Pinyin romanisation of various Chinese given names , including Jiěfàng ( 解放 ) and Jiéfāng ( 潔芳 ). People with these names include: Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin , or simply pinyin , is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese . In official documents, it

180-596: A -p , -t , or -k stop consonant . Despite the historical fact that the "entering" tone had already ceased to exist in 19th-century Beijing pronunciation, Norman notes that early Chinese–English dictionaries were "much concerned with including it". Many early dictionaries of Mandarin Chinese in Western languages were explicitly concerned not with the Beijing pronunciation of their time, but instead with Southern Mandarin,

270-615: A Jesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitled Xizi Qiji ( 西字奇蹟 ; 'Miracle of Western Letters') and published in Beijing in 1605. Twenty years later, fellow Jesuit Nicolas Trigault published 'Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati' ( 西儒耳目資 ; Xīrú ěrmù zī )) in Hangzhou. Neither book had any influence among

360-505: A koiné widely used up to the second half of the 19th century. Dictionary pages are formatted in three columns, each split between the head entry character, number, and pronunciations on the left, and the translation equivalents ("definitions"), cross references, and subentries of terms on the right. Giles attempts to arrange the subentry example words and phrases according to the order of the translation equivalents. The dictionary's approximately "hundred thousand examples" diversely range from

450-404: A tone number at the end of individual syllables. For example, tóng is written tong . Each tone can be denoted with its numeral the order listed above. The neutral tone can either be denoted with no numeral, with 0, or with 5. Briefly, tone marks should always be placed in the order a, e, i, o, u, ü , with the only exceptions being iu and io where the tone mark is placed on

540-615: A 46-page front matter (9-page Preface and 32-page Philological Essay) and the 1415-page dictionary, printed in triple columns, beginning with 60 pages of tables. The price was $ 35. For the subsequent two decades, Giles diligently worked "to correct mistakes, cut out duplicates and unnecessary matter, prepare revised Tables, and add a very large number of new phrases, taken from my reading in modern as well as in ancient literature". In 1903 Lord Lansdowne , then Foreign Secretary, asked Sir Ernest Satow , then Minister in Peking, by letter whether

630-637: A GB recommendation in 1996, and were last updated in 2012. In practice, however, published materials in China now often space pinyin syllable by syllable. According to Victor H. Mair , this practice became widespread after the Script Reform Committee, previously under direct control of the State Council , had its power greatly weakened in 1985 when it was renamed the State Language Commission and placed under

720-400: A common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals ( 复韵母 ; 複韻母 ; fùyùnmǔ ), i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials [ i ] and [ u ] are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of

810-585: A euphemism for coffins, death, etc."); then "Read chang . Old; senior. To excel; to increase; to grow." with 38 ("長妾 the senior concubine"); and then "Read chang . with 4 terms (e.g., 無長物 there is nothing over."). The alternate entry chang 長 [no tone] (408) says " See 450." Giles' A Chinese–English Dictionary has received both acclaim and censure. An early critic, the Chinese Malayan scholar Gu Hongming (1857–1928) criticized Giles' lack of overall insight into Chinese literature , and said It

900-498: A final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce yī ( 衣 ; 'clothes'), officially pronounced /í/ , as /jí/ and wéi ( 围 ; 圍 ; 'to enclose'), officially pronounced /uěi/ , as /wěi/ or /wuěi/ . Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below. The conventional lexicographical order derived from bopomofo is: In each cell below,

990-714: A fly-sheet at the end—without acknowledgement of Giles' corrections. Herbert Giles continued working on his Chinese–English dictionary for 15 years until 1889 when the Foreign Office granted his request to be stationed as Consul at Ningpo , where the workload was light and he could prepare the manuscript for press. The Shanghai publishers Kelly & Walsh printed the dictionary in 4 fascicules from 1891 to 1892. The first edition A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892), which Bernard Quaritch also published in London, had 2 royal quarto (250 by 320 mm.) volumes comprising

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1080-473: A front high rounded vowel, namely after the letters j , q , x , and y . For example, the sound of the word for 'fish' ( 鱼 ; 魚 ) is transcribed in pinyin simply as yú , not as * yǘ . This practice is opposed to Wade–Giles, which always uses ü , and Tongyong Pinyin , which always uses yu . Whereas Wade–Giles needs the umlaut to distinguish between chü (pinyin ju ) and chu (pinyin zhu ), this ambiguity does not arise with pinyin, so

1170-543: A good chance of being understood": the (1872) Chinese without a Teacher and (1877) Handbook of the Swatow Dialect: With a Vocabulary for Teochew dialect . His wide-ranging translations cover many genres of Chinese literature . Probably the best known are (1880, 1916) Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio , (1884, 1922) Gems of Chinese Literature , and (1889, 1926) Chuang Tzŭ, Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer . Giles' other writings include some of

1260-617: A lucky day; the conjunction of the sun and moon; in Taoist language, the state of unconscious innocence, as of an unborn babe"), and "Read tao . To lead; see No. 10,781" with 6 examples. The second edition gives 255 examples (for instance, adding "一達謂之道 that which passes through is called tao ", quoting the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary definition of dào ) and "Read tao . To lead; see 10,781" and 6 examples. The following tao 導 (10,781) "To lead; to guide" entry gives 7 examples in

1350-592: A nap on one side, known as 氆氇 . It comes from Tibet, and is used for making the winter caps of Lamas. Known to the Mongols as cheng-mé and chalma ." Second, Giles's dictionary has six tables, in addition to the requisite table of the 214 Kangxi Radicals (essential for using a radical-and-stroke index ) included by Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams. The tables are for Insignia of Official Rank , The Family Names , The Chinese Dynasties , Topographical , The Calendar , and Miscellaneous ( Chinese numerals ). Another table

1440-675: A new edition should be purchased for the British Peking legation and consulates, and whether publication should be funded from the Civil List Fund. After consulting with Giles, Satow supported the new publication in a letter dated May 29, 1903, stating "I understand from the author that the new edition is not a mere reproduction of the first. Mistakes have been corrected, further meanings have been added to many characters, frequent cross-references have been introduced, and no fewer than ten thousand new phrases have been distributed over

1530-477: A practical book of reference." Despite these deficiencies, Aylers says Giles' dictionary "held the field for many decades and lives on in successors", such as Robert Mathews ' (1931) A Chinese–English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission , many of whose definitions "are taken, without acknowledgment, from Giles". Today the dictionary is most often cited as the locus classicus of

1620-479: A tradition that originated with Morrison's work. Each of their dictionaries made contributions and improvements to the art of Chinese–English dictionary compilation. Giles' preface to the second edition gives a "Comparative Table of Phrases under Various Characters, Taken as Specimens, to illustrate the Progress of Chinese–English Lexicography", for example: Herbert Giles worked for 18 years to compile and publish

1710-718: A transliteration system for Chinese, his discussion ultimately led to a proliferation of proposed schemes. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and further improved by Herbert Giles , presented in Chinese–English Dictionary (1892). It was popular, and was used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. In 1943, the US military tapped Yale University to develop another romanization system for Mandarin Chinese intended for pilots flying over China—much more than previous systems,

1800-473: Is Vernon Nash's (1936) Trindex: an Index to Three Dictionaries or San zidian yinde 三字典引得, for A Chinese–English Dictionary , (1711) Peiwen Yunfu rime dictionary , and (1716) Kangxi Dictionary . The dictionary is alphabetically collated by Beijing Mandarin pronunciation romanized in the Wade–Giles system, a , ai , an , ang , etc. Within each syllabic pronunciation section, characters sharing

1890-662: Is based on the phonological system of Beijing Mandarin. Other romanization schemes have been devised to transcribe those other Chinese varieties, such as Jyutping for Cantonese and Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien . Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks , as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in bopomofo. Lowercase letters with tone marks are included in GB 2312 and their uppercase counterparts are included in JIS X 0212 ; thus Unicode includes all

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1980-493: Is both a medial and a coda, the nucleus may be dropped from writing. In this case, when the coda is a consonant n or ng , the only vowel left is the medial i, u , or ü , and so this takes the diacritic. However, when the coda is a vowel, it is the coda rather than the medial which takes the diacritic in the absence of a written nucleus. This occurs with syllables ending in -ui (from wei : wèi → -uì ) and in -iu (from you : yòu → -iù ). That is, in

2070-661: Is decidedly of less value than even the old dictionary of Dr. Williams. Arthur C. Moule, son of the Anglican missionary George Moule , wrote a critical review of Giles' dictionary, for instance, the 否 entry (3596) gives fou "Not; on the contrary; negative" and p'i "Bad; wicked. One of the diagrams." "Diagram" refers to the Yijing Hexagram 12 pǐ 否 "Obstruction". Moule says fou , p'i , or pei [ sic ] has three meanings" "not", "to obstruct; an obstacle", and "evil", but Giles accidentally omitted

2160-473: Is distinct from the concept of consonant and vowel sounds as basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Chinese language). Every syllable in Standard Chinese can be described as a pair of one initial and one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known as erhua ). The latter case, though

2250-722: Is found in the dictionary front matter, called the Table of Sounds or Table of Sounds for Dialects. Giles was the first Chinese–English lexicographer to systematically include homographs "a character with two or more readings" (which he calls "duplicate characters"). For instance, the character 長 can be pronounced cháng "long; lasting", zhǎng "grow up; increase", or zhàng "plenty; surplus": Wade–Giles ch'ang , chang and chang , respectively. The main entry ch'ang 長 (450) first has "Long, of time or space, as opposed to 短 short. Excelling; advantageous; profitable." with 59 words and phrases (e.g., "長生 long life; immortality. Used as

2340-466: Is not limited only to pinyin, since many languages that use the Latin alphabet natively also assign different values to the same letters. A recent study on Chinese writing and literacy concluded, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks." As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese , it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary Chinese ,

2430-614: Is not ordinarily reflected in pinyin spelling. Standard Chinese has many polysyllabic words. Like in other writing systems using the Latin alphabet, spacing in pinyin is officially based on word boundaries. However, there are often ambiguities in partitioning a word. The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography were put into effect in 1988 by the National Educational and National Language commissions. These rules became

2520-618: Is of course intended to supersede my own work. Well, dictionaries are like dogs, and have their day; and I should be the last person to whine over the appearance of the dictionary of the future, which it is to be hoped will come in good time, and will help to an easier acquisition of "the glorious language." Morrison and Medhurst, both Englishmen, between them held the blue ribbon of Chinese lexicography from 1816 to 1874; then it passed to Wells Williams, who held it for America until 1892, when I think I may claim to have recaptured it for my own country, and to have held it now for thirty-three years. In

2610-619: Is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet . Hanyu ( 汉语 ; 漢語 ) literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanisation system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations . Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It

2700-460: Is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü . Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is a lack of precomposed characters and limited font support for combining accents on the letter v , ( v̄ v́ v̌ v̀ ). This also presents a problem in transcribing names for use on passports, affecting people with names that consist of

2790-474: Is this want of philosophical insight in Dr. Giles which makes him so helpless in the arrangement of his materials in his books. Take for instance his great dictionary. It is in no sense a dictionary at all. It is merely a collection of Chinese phrases and sentences, translated by Dr. Giles without any attempt at selection, arrangement, order or method. As a dictionary for the purposes of the scholar, Dr. Giles' dictionary

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2880-570: Is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters , to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet . Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries . In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final , each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials ( semivowels coming before

2970-513: Is written over an i , then it replaces the tittle, as in yī . In dictionaries, neutral tone may be indicated by a dot preceding the syllable—e.g. ·ma . When a neutral tone syllable has an alternative pronunciation in another tone, a combination of tone marks may be used: zhī·dào ( 知道 ) may be pronounced either zhīdào or zhīdao . Before the advent of computers, many typewriter fonts did not contain vowels with macron or caron diacritics. Tones were thus represented by placing

3060-588: The Peiwen Yunfu rime dictionary ) and fanqie , nine regional varieties of Chinese (commonly mistaken for mutually-understandable " dialects "), and the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean languages. Giles' dictionary went far beyond Williams', which glosses pronunciations in Middle Chinese and four regional varieties: Shantou , Amoy , Fuzhou , and Shanghai Chinese. Giles' dictionary abbreviates

3150-583: The Book of Odes . The book-language fades imperceptibly into the colloquial". A third lexicographical shortcoming is the random arrangement of subentries, "requiring the reader to con up and down the columns". As a general rule, Giles explains, "the meanings found in the Classics stand first, and more modern and colloquial meanings follow. But to this rule there are some striking exceptions, purposely introduced, so as not to impair any value this Dictionary may have as

3240-544: The Kangxi Dictionary and modern vernacular colloquialisms that Giles "laboriously collected from books read and conversations held during a long stretch of years." Second, Giles failed to indicate stylistic level, which he justifies on the "(somewhat specious) grounds" that, "No division of phraseology into classical and colloquial has been made, for the simple reason that no real line of demarcation exists. Expressions are used in ordinary conversation which occur in

3330-477: The Ministry of Education . Mair claims that proponents of Chinese characters in the educational bureaucracy "became alarmed that word-based pinyin was becoming a de facto alternative to Chinese characters as a script for writing Mandarin and demanded that all pinyin syllables be written separately." Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade–Giles and postal romanization , and replaced bopomofo as

3420-551: The Wade–Giles romanisation system, for which the name of Giles is widely known even to non-specialists. Apart from this, its practical use is mainly as a repository of late Ch'ing bureaucratic phraseology, though it is replete with fascinating nuggets of information and is a wonderful book for browsing. The American sinologist and linguist Jerry Norman calls Giles' dictionary the "first truly adequate Chinese–English dictionary", with pronunciation glosses that were "by and large free of

3510-473: The "best and highest planes of Chinese thought" to everyday words and nursery rhymes. The Chinese character 道 for dào "way; path; say; the Dao " or dǎo "guide; lead; conduct; instruct; direct" (or 導 clarified with Radical 41 寸 "thumb; inch") is a good litmus test for a dictionary because it has two pronunciations and complex semantics. The sample entry from Giles' dictionary for tao 道 (10,780) gives

3600-638: The "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlier romanization systems . The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since. The International Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin as ISO 7098 in 1982, and the United Nations began using it in 1986. Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as its official romanization system in 2009, replacing Tongyong Pinyin . Matteo Ricci ,

3690-494: The 1892 first edition A Chinese–English Dictionary , which contains 10,859 character head entries plus 2,989 variant characters for a total of 13,848 entries. He decided to number every head entry—an improvement lacking in the earlier dictionaries of Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams—in order to facilitate internal cross-referencing and make it easier for users to find characters. Giles subsequently worked for 20 years revising and adding "a vast number of compounds and phrases" to

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3780-567: The 1912 second edition, which contains 10,926 head entries (67 more) plus 2,922 variants, also totaling 13,848. Despite the addition of new head entries to the second edition, Giles kept the original 13,848 numerical arrangement owing to an unintended consequence . People in China were using the dictionary numbers as a Chinese telegraph code , that is, a character encoding index for telegraphs written in Chinese characters—analogous with modern Chinese input methods for computers . Another example of using Giles' 13,848 numbers to index characters

3870-495: The American missionary Williams, Giles devoted himself to publishing a new dictionary that "was meant to bring the glory of having compiled the best Chinese–English dictionary back from America to England". Five years later, Giles published a 40-page brochure (1879) On some Translations and Mistranslations in Dr. Williams' Syllabic Dictionary that was reported extensively among English-language newspapers published in China. "I

3960-481: The China Inland Mission . In contrast to Morrison, Medhurst, Williams, and Mathews, who were all Christian missionaries in China, Giles was an agnostic anti-clericalist . The historian Huiling Yang found that although Giles strongly criticized Williams' dictionary, it turns out that Giles' own dictionary is more closely linked to Williams' than to Morrison's, which Giles praised highly. Medhurst's, Williams', and Giles' Chinese–English dictionaries are all members of

4050-634: The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the United States and China in 1979. In 2001, the Chinese government issued the National Common Language Law , providing a legal basis for applying pinyin. The current specification of the orthography is GB/T 16159–2012. Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of sound pairs of two initials ( 声母 ; 聲母 ; shēngmǔ ) and finals ( 韵母 ; 韻母 ; yùnmǔ ). This

4140-546: The Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on 11 February 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults. Despite its formal promulgation, pinyin did not become widely used until after the tumult of the Cultural Revolution . In the 1980s, students were trained in pinyin from an early age, learning it in tandem with characters or even before. During

4230-601: The Private Use Areas, and some input methods (e.g. Sogou Pinyin) also outputs the Private Use Areas code point instead of the original character. As the superset GB 18030 changed the mappings of ⟨ḿ⟩ and ⟨ǹ⟩ , this has caused an issue where the input methods and font files use different encoding standards, and thus the input and output of both characters are mixed up. Other symbols are used in pinyin are as follows: The spelling of Chinese geographical or personal names in pinyin has become

4320-416: The absence of a written nucleus the finals have priority for receiving the tone marker, as long as they are vowels; if not, the medial takes the diacritic. An algorithm to find the correct vowel letter (when there is more than one) is as follows: Worded differently, The above can be summarized as the following table. The vowel letter taking the tone mark is indicated by the fourth-tone mark. Tone sandhi

4410-482: The artificiality found in earlier works". He also says that Giles, like his predecessors, mixed literary and colloquial definitions together without distinction, and concludes that the dictionary "remains a rich depository of nineteenth-century Peking colloquial words and phrases, in other respects it has been superseded by later dictionaries". A recent book on Chinese lexicography says Giles' dictionary has "special significance and interest" and "enjoys pride of place in

4500-534: The character and number over pronunciations from Cantonese tou to Vietnamese dau on the left, and the translation equivalents and examples on the right. Note that {} brackets indicate translation equivalents added in the second edition. A road; a path; a way. Hence; the road par excellence ; the right way; the true path; {the λόγος of the New Test.; identified by Kingsmill with the Buddhist Mârga ,

4590-609: The common accented characters from pinyin. Other punctuation mark and symbols in Chinese are to use the equivalent symbol in English noted in to GB 15834. According to GB 16159, all accented letters are required to have both uppercase and lowercase characters as per their normal counterparts. GBK has mapped two characters ⟨ḿ⟩ and ⟨ǹ⟩ to Private Use Areas in Unicode respectively, thus some fonts (e.g. SimSun) that adhere to GBK include both characters in

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4680-552: The competitive Foreign Office examination for a Student Interpretership in China, and began studying the Chinese language at Peking. He later criticized his first Chinese book, a Part II reprint of Robert Morrison 's (1815–1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, in Three Parts , because it failed to mark aspiration , "much as if an English–Chinese dictionary, for the use of the Chinese, were published without

4770-421: The contemporary Chinese literati, and the romanizations they introduced primarily were useful for Westerners. During the late Qing, the reformer Song Shu (1862–1910) proposed that China adopt a phonetic writing system. A student of the scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan , Song had observed the effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning during his visits to Japan. While Song did not himself propose

4860-702: The country after the People's Republic was established. Earlier attempts to romanize Chinese writing were mostly abandoned in 1944. Zhou became an economics professor in Shanghai, and when the Ministry of Education created the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language in 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned him the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he

4950-501: The dictionary itself, printed in triple columns. Compared with the first edition of 1,461 total pages, the 1,813-page second edition is 398 pages longer. Giles produced the first edition entirely at his own risk, and it cost £2300, towards which the Foreign Office gave £300. The second edition cost £4800, towards which they gave £250. Giles' Chinese–English dictionary remained in "constant use" for generations. A compact edition

5040-490: The entries as they now stand, chiefly drawn from sources in which the Dictionary has been found to be deficient". The revised and enlarged second edition (1912) was likewise published by Kelly & Walsh and Bernard Quaritch in 7 fascicules printed from 1909 to 1912. It had 2 royal quarto volumes, with Part I comprising a 17-page preface (with extracts from the first edition) and 84 pages of tables; and Part II comprising

5130-621: The first edition and 8 in the second, for instance "導師 the guiding Teacher—Buddha". Herbert Giles created the first Chinese–English encyclopedic dictionary in two ways, with comprehensive explanations under head entries and with informative tables. His example was followed by many later Chinese–English dictionaries up to the present time. First, some dictionary entries include in-depth information. Take pǔlu 氆氇 "a woolen fabric made in Tibet" as an example. Giles gives P'u 氆 (9514) "An open-woven, thick woolen cloth, either plain or flowered, with

5220-647: The first edition, Giles uses 5 to denote alternate tonal pronunciations that he had heard, eruditely described as " tra cotanto senno " ( Italian for "amid such wisdom", from Dante's Inferno ). The prior dictionaries of Morrison, Williams, and Medhurst annotate tones in terms of the traditional four tones of Middle Chinese pronunciation used in rime dictionaries such as the Kangxi ; namely píng 平 "level" tone, shàng 上 "rising", qù 去 "departing", and rù 入"entering" tone. Giles uses an asterisk to indicate archaic entering tone , with denoting second tone with

5310-486: The first general histories of China, the (1901) A History of Chinese Literature , (1906) Religions of Ancient China , and (1911) The Civilization of China . Herbert Giles says he decided to compile A Chinese–English Dictionary after his review of Williams' A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language "brought down on my head many objurgations from the author's friends". As Giles explains in his previously unpublished (c. 1918–1925) typescript memoirs, [The] review

5400-461: The following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals. The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n , -ng , and -r , the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix . A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese , reflecting final consonants in Old Chinese ), or indicates

5490-598: The height of the Cold War the use of pinyin system over Wade–Giles and Yale romanizations outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the mainland Chinese government. Beginning in the early 1980s, Western publications addressing mainland China began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems; this change followed the Joint Communiqué on

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5580-462: The history of bilingual Chinese lexicography, Giles' Dictionary is the fourth major Chinese–English dictionary after Robert Morrison's (1815–1823) A Dictionary of the Chinese Language , Walter Henry Medhurst 's (1842) Chinese and English Dictionary , and Samuel Wells Williams ' (1874) A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language . Giles' dictionary was superseded by Robert Henry Mathews ' (1931) A Chinese–English Dictionary Compiled for

5670-441: The initials ⟨ l ⟩ and ⟨ n ⟩ when necessary in order to represent the sound [y] . This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü (e.g. 驴 ; 驢 ; 'donkey') from the back high rounded vowel in lu (e.g. 炉 ; 爐 ; 'oven'). Tonal markers are placed above the umlaut, as in lǘ . However, the ü is not used in the other contexts where it could represent

5760-436: The letter h , showing no difference between the conjunction and and the [h]and of the body". Herbert A. Giles wrote some 60 publications on Chinese culture and language (see Wikisource list ), which may be divided into four broad categories: reference works, language textbooks, translations, and miscellaneous writings. His pioneering reference books established new standards of accuracy. Of all his publications, Giles

5850-399: The meaning "principles" under mou 謀 (8032) "to plot; to scheme", " Tai chi " 太極 under 極 (859), dàotái 道臺 "(historical) the magistrate of a dào district/circuit", and the syntactic use of 道 as a classifier or measure word for rivers/topics/etc. The first edition 道 entry gives 230 examples of words and phrases for tao "way; path" (e.g., "黃道 the ecliptic ; good luck;

5940-772: The method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China . The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:2015). The United Nations followed suit in 1986. It has also been accepted by the government of Singapore , the United States's Library of Congress , the American Library Association , and many other international institutions. Pinyin assigns some Latin letters sound values which are quite different from those of most languages. This has drawn some criticism as it may lead to confusion when uninformed speakers apply either native or English assumed pronunciations to words. However, this problem

6030-404: The more convenient form ju is used instead of jü . Genuine ambiguities only happen with nu / nü and lu / lü , which are then distinguished by an umlaut. Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü . Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v

6120-440: The most common way to transcribe them in English. Pinyin has also become the dominant Chinese input method in mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan, where bopomofo is most commonly used. Families outside of Taiwan who speak Mandarin as a mother tongue use pinyin to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know. Chinese families outside of Taiwan who speak some other language as their mother tongue use

6210-579: The names of several pinyin letters using -ê finals. According to the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet , ng can be abbreviated with the shorthand ŋ . However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering it on computers. (Starts with the vowel sound in f a ther and ends in the velar nasal ; like s ong in some dialects of American English) An umlaut is added to ⟨ u ⟩ when it occurs after

6300-483: The nine varieties ("dialects") by their initial letter: C. Cantonese , H. Hakka , F. Foochow , W. Wênchow , N. Ningpo , P. Pekingese , M. "Mid-China", Y. Yangchow , and S. Ssuch'uan , as well as in K. Korean , J. Japanese , and A. Annamese languages. Tones are annotated with a superscript number in the upper right of a character or romanized word; the four tones of Beijing Mandarin are indicated as 1 "high-level", 2 "rising", 3 "dipping", and 4 "falling". In

6390-529: The path which leads to Nirvâna;} the truth; religion{; principles see 8032}. Of or belonging to Taoism { see 太極 859}. A district; a region; a political division of the empire, varying under different dynasties; a circuit; a Tao-t'ai . To speak; to tell. {A numerative; see entries.}. The 1912 second edition adds references to Christian Greek scriptural λόγος logos , Thomas William Kingsmill's (1899) Daodejing translation comparing dào with Sanskrit mārga "path; (Buddhist) paths to liberation ",

6480-558: The pinyin letters assigned to each initial are accompanied by their phonetic realizations in brackets, notated according to the International Phonetic Alphabet . In each cell below, the first line indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an -r , which are omitted,

6570-412: The pinyin system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à. There is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone: a. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents the syllable nucleus , unless that letter is missing. Tones are used in Hanyu Pinyin symbols, and they do not appear in Chinese characters. Tones are written on the finals of Chinese pinyin. If the tone mark

6660-411: The practice to use "LYU" and "NYU" in passports. Although nüe written as nue , and lüe written as lue are not ambiguous, nue or lue are not correct according to the rules; nüe and lüe should be used instead. However, some Chinese input methods support both nve / lve (typing v for ü ) and nue / lue . The pinyin system also uses four diacritics to mark the tones of Mandarin . In

6750-487: The result appears very similar to modern Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li , Lu Zhiwei , Li Jinxi , Luo Changpei , as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin", worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild

6840-526: The same phonetic element and different graphic radicals are arranged together, for instance, the phonetic ai 艾 (number 32) "mugwort; artemisia" is followed by ai 哎 (33, with the mouth radical ) "an interjection of surprise", ai 餀 (34, food radical ) "food which has been spoilt", and ai 鴱 (35, bird radical ) "the hen of the tailor-bird". Pronunciations are glossed in late 19th-century Beijing Mandarin. In addition, Giles glosses pronunciations in archaic Middle Chinese rime ("R." according to

6930-418: The second vowel instead. Pinyin tone marks appear primarily above the syllable nucleus—e.g. as in kuài , where k is the initial, u the medial, a the nucleus, and i is the coda. There is an exception for syllabic nasals like /m/ , where the nucleus of the syllable is a consonant: there, the diacritic will be carried by a written dummy vowel. When the nucleus is / ə / (written e or o ), and there

7020-518: The second, which is the hexagram's meaning. The English sinologist Charles Aylmer, who first published The Memoirs of H. A. Giles from a Cambridge University Library manuscript, gives a balanced evaluation on the dictionary. Aylmer says the second edition "impresses by its sheer bulk" but falls short of the "highest standards of the best 19th-century lexicography". First, the dictionary does not cite sources for terms, but diversely includes both Classical Chinese literary archaisms from sources like

7110-443: The sound lü or nü , particularly people with the surname 吕 ( Lǚ ), a fairly common surname, particularly compared to the surnames 陆 ( Lù ), 鲁 ( Lǔ ), 卢 ( Lú ) and 路 ( Lù ). Previously, the practice varied among different passport issuing offices, with some transcribing as "LV" and "NV" while others used "LU" and "NU". On 10 July 2012, the Ministry of Public Security standardized

7200-498: The standard written language prior to the early 1900s. In particular, Chinese characters retain semantic cues that help distinguish differently pronounced words in the ancient classical language that are now homophones in Mandarin. Thus, Chinese characters remain indispensable for recording and transmitting the corpus of Chinese writing from the past. Pinyin is not designed to transcribe varieties other than Standard Chinese, which

7290-488: The system to teach children Mandarin pronunciation when learning vocabulary in elementary school. Since 1958, pinyin has been actively used in adult education as well, making it easier for formerly illiterate people to continue with self-study after a short period of pinyin literacy instruction. A Chinese%E2%80%93English Dictionary Herbert Giles served as a British consular officer in late Qing dynasty China until from 1867 to 1892. After his return to England, he

7380-441: The use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones. Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê [ɛ] ( 欸 ; 誒 ) and syllabic nasals m ( 呒 , 呣 ), n ( 嗯 , 唔 ), ng ( 嗯 , 𠮾 ) are used as interjections or in neologisms ; for example, pinyin defines

7470-435: The vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant). Diacritics are used to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts. Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Wang Li , Lu Zhiwei , Li Jinxi , Luo Changpei and Zhou Youguang , who has been called

7560-461: Was appointed the second professor of Chinese at the University of Cambridge , in succession to Thomas Francis Wade. They are renowned for developing what was later called the Wade–Giles romanization system of Chinese, which Giles' A Chinese–English Dictionary firmly established as the standard in the Western world until the 1958 official international pinyin system. In 1867, Giles passed

7650-528: Was authored in January 1956 by Ye Laishi , Lu Zhiwei and Zhou Youguang. A revised Pinyin scheme was proposed by Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei and Li Jinxi, and became the main focus of discussion among the group of Chinese linguists in June 1956, forming the basis of Pinyin standard later after incorporating a wide range of feedback and further revisions. The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and officially adopted at

7740-673: Was badly mauled" in the Daily Press (Hong Kong) , "received unstinted praise" in the North China Daily News , and was supported in the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal , which said "the Dictionary is in fault in most of the instances given." Giles sent a copy of his brochure to Williams, but received no reply. Since Williams reprinted his dictionary from stereotype plates , he was unable to make corrections, and added, in 1883, an Errata and Corrections on

7830-469: Was most proud of (1892, 1912) A Chinese–English Dictionary , and (1898) A Chinese Biographical Dictionary . Giles' textbooks for Chinese language learners include (1873) A Dictionary of Colloquial Idioms in the Mandarin Dialect and two Chinese phrasebooks transliterated phonetically according to the English alphabet, "so that anyone could pick up the book and read off a simple sentence with

7920-576: Was not a linguist by trade. Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, including Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), Latinxua Sin Wenz (1931), and the diacritics from bopomofo (1918). "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect." An initial draft

8010-436: Was of Dr Williams' Syllabic Dictionary ( Evening Gazette , 16 Sept., 1874), for which I was freely bespattered with abuse from all American quarters. I showed up a multiplicity of absurd blunders and equally egregious omissions; and I wound up with these prophetic words: "We do not hesitate to pronounce Dr Williams the lexicographer, not for the future, but of the past." I at once began upon a dictionary of my own. Provoked by

8100-428: Was reprinted by Paragon Books (Chicago) in 1964, Ch'eng Wen (Taipei) in 1978, and is still available online. Giles learned that Edmund Backhouse , one of his first Chinese language students at Cambridge, had been trying for years to compile a Chinese–English dictionary. In 1925, he used it to metaphorically describe Chinese bilingual lexicography in terms of international sports competition . [Backhouse's dictionary]

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