These days I was working on tranlating the system in Cantonese
Chinese Input to Mandarin Chinese Input. The first step is to identify
the consonants and vowels. There are very many different versions and
after researching on the topic, I find these facts are most correct:
21 consonants plus 1 zero consonant meaning that the vowels are pronounced as they are:
‘b’, ‘p’, ‘m’, ‘f’, ‘d’, ‘t’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘g’, ‘k’, ‘h’, ‘z’, ‘c’, ‘s’,
‘zh’, ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘r’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘x’ is not considered as no
consonant. ‘-’ can be used. ‘x’ is like ‘s’ but in mandarin, they are
different in terms of emphasis, light/heavy s.
There are 38 vowels and in many versions, only 35 vowels as several
vowels do not have their consonant part. The following is a scanned copy
of Mr. Wong or Mr. Huang if pronounced in Mandarin:
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List of Mandarin Vowels
I organised the syllable table with the consonants and vowels with the single vowels addition as follows:
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Figure My mandarin Pinyin Syllable Table
I have verified with other versions:
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One Pinyin Chart
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Another Pinyin Chart
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More Pinyin Syllable Table
Some versions add consonants ‘y’ and ‘w’ but the original scheme is
to add ‘y’ and ‘w’ to the no consonant vowels like ‘u’ for ‘wu’ and ‘ü’
for ‘yu’ or even ‘ia’ as ‘ya’. Changing the syllable table makes pinyin
more confusing.
Not all combinations are valid syllables and invalid ones are now
excluded. Some version do a count to say the total is 412, some says 409
and I got 420 but some syllables do not have characters but maybe I
have not found characters under those syllables, they are ‘lo’, ‘shong’,
‘rua’, ‘ruang’,’ nun’, ‘nia’, ‘lün’, ‘diang’, ‘ê’ for ‘e’, and ‘kei’.
Some use ‘m’ and ‘n’ as vowels and will come to 420-10+2=412 as well.
But with ‘ong’ being ‘weng’, there will only be 411. I am not sure about
the 412 total for some version meant those syllables I listed. Please
let me know for those who is knowledgeable in the area.
Please test drive my design at:
http://pcwong.org/mandarin/
and
http://pcwong.org/mandarin/pinyin.html for pinyin input.
Have fun!
