ITC - Introduction to Chinese II - Pinyin

Basically, it's the phonetic system for Chinese.

It has 3 elements:

1. 1. initials
   2. finals
   3. tones

Pinyin, formally Hanyu Pinyin (simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音 Hàn yǔ pīn yīn ), is the official phonetic system for transcribing the sound of Chinese characters into Latin script in China and Singapore.

Hànyǔ ( 汉语 ) means the spoken language of the Han people and Pīnyīn ( 拼音 ) literally means "spelled-out sounds."

Initials and Finals

The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally given in terms of Initials and Finals and Tones . Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).

An example of Pinyin would be like: 　

FYI: Unlike European languages, clusters of letters - initials (simplified Chinese: 声母 shēngmǔ) and finals (simplified Chinese: 韵母 yùnmǔ) - and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language). Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (see below). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. One exception is the city Harbin (simplified Chinese: 哈尔滨 ; traditional Chinese: 哈爾濱 ), whose name comes from the Manchu language.

The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s based on earlier forms of romanization. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1982.

Information on this page used with courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin CCBYNC

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