Simply put, a character’s pronunciation was essentially dependent on two characters, known as the “onset” and the “final”. In fact, it is one of the most important sources linguists turn towards when trying to reconstruct Middle Chinese sounds as they were spoken back then. The Qieyun was so significant, it became an “authoritative source” for literary pronunciations when Classic Chinese poetry boomed in the Tang dynasty. While surviving sources and texts showing fanqie include the Yupian and the Jingdian Shiwen from the 6th century, perhaps the most renown surviving text was the rhyming dictionary known as the Qieyun (切韻), publishing in the Sui dynasty at the turn of the 7th century CE. Several centuries later, the fanqie method arose, theorised to originate from the introduction of Indian phonetic knowledge brought over to China in the 1st century CE, when Buddhism spread to China. Surviving examples showing this method include the Erya (爾雅) from the 3rd century BCE, literally translating to “approaching elegance”, using the 爾 (you) as a phonetic loan character for 邇 (approach, near). By showing a character with a similar pronunciation, this was perhaps the earliest known method used to teach new Chinese characters. It will come in useful later on.Įarly Chinese dictionaries used to employ this “sounds like” approach to teaching Chinese characters, and is also known as the dúruò 讀若 method. Remember this rhyming thing mentioned here. So for, say, bottle in Mandarin Chinese (瓶子, pinyin: píngzi), it would be transcribed in bopomofo as ㄆㄧㄥˊ ㄗ. The tone markers, denoting one of the four Mandarin Chinese tones, would be placed last.
Chinese transliteration system full#
Combining these rhymes and medials would yield the full combination of bopomofo finals, or how every single way a Chinese character or syllable could end. You see, the bopomofo works by having separate characters for the initial consonants and rhymes and medials. The answer seems to do something related to the bopomofo. How did these characters get taught centuries back, or even, a couple of millennia back? However, these methods were all created in the 20th century. In fact, this is the main input method for Chinese characters in Taiwan, including dictionaries, books, and other documents. Consisting of 37 characters and four tone marks, the bopomofo attempts to transcribe all possible sounds in Mandarin Chinese.
Created in the 1910s, it was used in mainland China up until 1958, but in Taiwan, it is still in use today. Rewinding back several decades, we find another transliteration system called the bopomofo, also known as the zhùyīnfúhào (注音符號). Created in the 1950s, the hànyǔ pīnyīn is by far, the most extensive teaching method for Mandarin Chinese characters today. For a long time now, I have been wondering, how did people back then learn Mandarin Chinese characters? Today, we have the convenience of learning new characters by just looking at the hànyǔ pīnyīn, which is the official romanisation system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in mainland China, and is also used in teaching Mandarin Chinese in Singapore, and to some extent, Malaysia and Taiwan.
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