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It has been six weeks in Hangzhou, China. This has given me enough time to decipher the Mandarin language. Mainland China uses Simplified Chinese. Chinese cannot be transliterated but only transcribed. What makes Chinese so different are the following facts:
- There is no concept of vowels (a,e,i,o,u) or consontants. It's all about initials, finals and tones.
- The same character can correspond to two (or more) different sounds. For example, 言 can be transcribed as yán or yín or yàn
- The same sound can correspond to two (or more) different characters. For example, tā can be written as 他 or 她 or 踏
Here, I have come up with a scheme to pronounce Chinese as closely as possible by the Indian tongue. It's easy because Indian languages (say Hindi or Kannada) are "phonetic" -- we pronounce the way we write. One letter, one sound.
The rest of the article assumes that you have some knowledge of Pinyin, Devanagari, International Phonetic Alphabet, Vedic Accent, Sanskrit phonology and Mandarin phonology. Read on full article here !
Category: Languages Posted by: bdsatish
