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Archive 1Archive 2

Alphabetization

Why does this page have the Chinese Romanization template? There is perfectly good reason to have all those articles about representing Chinese words phonetically conveniently linked to from here, but labeling Zhuyin as a Romanization scheme is just plain incorrect since it doesn't use the Roman alphabet. [[User:Livajo|力伟|т]] 06:03, 27 September 2004 (UTC)

content for pages

Anyone thought of putting Zhuyin onto various chinese related article pages next to the pinyin and Wade-Giles representations?

Better put your comment into Wikipedia talk:China-related topics notice board because a consensus should be reached prior doing so. -- G.S.K.Lee 14:06, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Zhuyin experts needed for Templates

Someone suggested we add Xiao'erjing and Bopomofo into Template:Chinese. The person had the IP 132.205.44.5. I don't know where this person went? Can we get some more expert at Template talk:Chinese on how these can be added into the template? Thanks. Benjwong 03:44, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Move to Zhuyin method

Should this article be moved to "Zhuyin method" to be consistent with Pinyin method and Cangjie method? Leon math 21:35, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

This comment was originally at the top of the page. P0M 03:13, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Oops, sorry. Leon math 16:33, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
If there is an article called Zhuyin method, it should be linked to zh:注音輸入法. -✉ Hello World! 18:49, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

ㄧ and 一

The article consistently uses 一 to represent yi (i), but half of my fonts show this character as a vertical stroke ㄧ. I suppose they could be variants intended for vertical and horizontal writing. But according to Unicode 一 (U+4E00) is the Chinese character for "one", different from U+3127. The appearance doesn't matter to me as much as the correct encoding. Should all occurrences of 一 be changed to ㄧ? MJ 11:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Vertical Chinese texts use horizontal glyph and horizontal Chinese texts use vertical glyph. However, none of the computer fonts support this kind of variation. Simplified Chinese fonts always give vertical form and traditional Chinese fonts always give horizontal form. so in rare cases when distinction is important, we have to use a horizontal line (I think an en dash is better than hanzi) or a vertical line to substitute it. -✉ Hello World! 18:49, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Etymology

五: This 五, means "5". My source is Habein and Mathias Complete guide to Everyday Kanji. There it decribes this character as being a pictogram of a bobbin, used first as phonetic element, then replacing a character consisting of five strokes.

The etymology as "Ying, yang, Heaven and Earth" must be considered to be at least "disputed", though I'm aware that zhongwen has the Ying, yang etymology. Personally, I find the etymology there has the feel of folk etymology. I find Habein and Mathias more convincing.

I propose removing the etymology, as it digressional and disputed. Zeimusu 12:16, 2004 Apr 30 (UTC)

It is unlikely that the character in question objectifies a bobbin as its usage dates back to as early as the Shang Jiaguwen, a period in which bone scriptures were used to forecast future events. The Wuxing was the central ideology behind this as they were believed to have spawned all things tangible and intangible within the universe, which were in turn given to rise by Yin and Yang. The character is likely, then, to be a derivative of this notion. Furthermore, as the book of your mentioning deals with Kanji and not Hanzi (synonymous yes, but only in the sense of what is written), the character etymology may not be consistent with the ancient Chinese form. --Taoster 00:19, 1 May 2004 (UTC)


I'm not sure I follow the reasoning here. That this character is very old is not disputed, but I don't see why that should be seen as evidence against it having, originally, a mundane meaning. I don't see why, even given the central importance of wuxing to the ancient people, that this makes it likely that this character is derived from wuxing.

Then again I wonder how this character came to have the meaning "5". Habein and Mathias claim it is a case of homonynomy.

Also, the argument that Habein and Mathias is a Kanji book, and therefore may not be consitent with hanzi is false. The period we are discussing (as you say, as early as Shang Jiaguwen, and before) predates the introduction of chinese characters to Japan. So the etymologies discussed are the etymologies of the character in China, so there is no hanzi/kanji distiction. Habein and Mathias reference Western, Japanese and Chinese authors in their bibliography.

Either, one or both of these etymologies is wrong, or there were two characters, identical in form but differing in meaning in ancient China.

In any case, the original meaning of this character is of marginal importance to the development of Zhuyin, and on that basis alone I think the remark should be removed.

Zeimusu 15:26, 2004 May 1 (UTC)

Duly noted, but realize that the character is composed of four strokes and not five. Also, there IS a distinction between Hanzi and Kanji IF the etymology as described in the book is based on any of several post Seal Script forms, however delineated. I think the real dispute here is whether the character is a logograph or a pictograph. --Taoster 00:29, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

That's true. -- I have removed the etymology as per my last paragraph, and I'll go look at the image page of and see if there is a more appropriate place for character etymology. Zeimusu 12:35, 2004 May 2 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed this discussion before. I just checked my giant etymological dictionary. According to it, the jiagu records were either "X" or "X" with bars top and bottom. A bronze-script alternative was five horizontal strokes -- which could get confusing in a line of numbers. Another reason given for favoring the "barred X" form was that 1, 2, 3, and 4 were viewed as one mini-series, and 6, 7, 8, and 9 were viewed as a second mini-series, and the double-ended format of "X" suggested a connecting link between similar series. P0M 00:17, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

  • To continue this aside on the etymology of ㄨ and 五, (this directed at Taoster) there is no evidence of Wuxing philosophy shaping the OB (jiagu) characters, and rather than the characters having fundamental abstract meanings, it is widely believed by etymologists that they tend to be based on the concrete and that which is easy to depict. Such graphs for concrete forms were then borrowed, often much later, in order to write more abstract notions. So readings of abstract, Yinyang notions into etymology tend to be BS, even when written by someone as influential as 許慎 Xŭ Shèn. Thus, regarding the 'bobbin' or 'spool' theory (by 丁山 Dīng Shān, I think), it is based on the notion of the word for 'five' (now wu3) being homophonous with an old word for 'spool', the character for which was later written 互 plus 竹 atop it, pronounced hu4. That graph is obsolete now. Note that 互 is also almost identical in graphic form to the 五 graph. The homography and homophony are strong evidence for this theory. (The modern, colloquial term for 'spool' is now different: 絞絲器 jiǎosīqì, lit. 'silk winding tool'.) The 互/五 (or rather, the graphic ancestor of both these) was borrowed for 'five' and also later for 'mutual', with the two eventually diverging graphically.
  • This is one theory. Another is that the X form is just an arbitrary symbol. As for the OB form of five, there are basically four: a bare ㄨ (X), an X barred top and bottom with the bars not extending past the diagonals (like a black widow's hourglass), an X barred top and bottom with the bars extending past the diagonals (like the Roman numeral) and five horizontal strokes. Acc. to 趙誠 Zhào Chéng, the bare form is considered, based on current archaeological evidence, to be earlier than the barred form. The barred form is more common. The only evidence of its meaning in the OB is as 'five'. Just FYI. (Source: 趙誠 Zhào Chéng (1988) 甲骨文簡明詞典 – 卜辭分類讀本 jiǎgǔwén jiǎnmíng cídiǎn – bǔcí fēnlèi dúbĕn. 中華書局 Zhōnghúa Shūjú, ISBN 7-101-00254-4/H•22).
  • Regardless, we can safely say that the zhuyin symbol ㄨ wu is from one of the OB forms of its homophone 五 wu3. Dragonbones (talk) 08:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
  • How about ㄅ (b) ← from 包 (bao), another Chinese character more similar. Briston 10:23, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
That seems more plausible, judging from the Chinese version of this article and the explanations on this page from a linguist in Taiwan (in Traditional Chinese): http://olddoc.tmu.edu.tw/chiaushin/marker.htm

Automated Translation

Gymshaw (talk) 00:26, 29 April 2008 (UTC) Software that provides instant Chinese (Traditional or Simplified) to Zhuyin translation can be helpful for people learning Chinese--especially those with roots in Taiwan.

minor correction regarding 幺

The article originally said that 幺 is an entirely obsolete character. But besides being used as the simplified version of "mo" (as in shemma, etc.), it shows up when Googled in many kinship terms, "my father was the 'little' son of the family", etc. It occurs in a couple of compounds in the Guo2 yu3 ci2 dian3, including one that means "second-rate prostitute". So it is not "entirely obsolete." P0M 06:07, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Haha, 幺 as used for "second-rate prostitute" is a native Shanghainese word. I've never heard it used for Mandarin though. --Mamin27 06:26, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
么 pronounces as "ma2" (simplified version as in shenma (什麼 → 什么), but usually pronounces as shenmo) and 幺 pronounces as "yao1" (explanation see above). Many texts get messed up by these two words due to their similar shapes. --✉ Hello World! 18:49, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
There is some historical basis for this. The traditional characters for 么 exist in two versions: 麼 with 幺 and 麽 with 么. In the Chinese input methods in Windows, 么 is listed under "yao", and 幺 isn't even listed in one of them. In the CEDICT Chinese dictionary, several words containing "yao1" are listed with 么, but none with 幺. Finally, the Unihan database lists 么 as a simplified version of 幺. So clearly, in some ways they can be considered the same character. Rōnin (talk) 09:30, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

chu-yin?

I doubt it is spelled "chu-yin" any longer in govt. sources. kwami (talk) 09:22, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

The official term is "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS)" and has been for some time. Corroboration viewable online includes the Taiwan/ROC Yearbooks from 2001 to 2006 and the general online information at the official Government Information Office website. — AjaxSmack 17:33, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Who said anything different? I doubt it is spelled "chu-yin" any longer in govt. sources. kwami (talk) 17:50, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Settle down, Beavis. I was agreeing with you. I can't find "chu-yin" in any govt sources either. — AjaxSmack 19:13, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Requested move (2008)

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the proposal was Moved to Bopomofo by consensus in the disucussion, please reflect the reason for the name in the article. Keegantalk 06:38, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Zhuyin → Bopomofo — Bopomofo is the more common English name for this phonetic alphabet. It is also the name used by international organizations such as ISO. In addition, it is odd to romanize the name using a competing phonetic system. —Voidvector (talk) 08:29, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's naming conventions.
  • Oppose but am open-minded pending new evidence. I agree with User:Kwamikagami that using "'Bopomofo' is like saying 'ABCs'" in Chinese but I will admit that the term is more formal in English which is what is relevant here. I'm not too enamoured with the current title either — "zhuyin" seems abbreviated compared with the full "zhuyin fuhao" — but the nominal "official" English name, "Manadarin Phonetic Symbols" is a bit vague. Other sources I've seen are all over the place. (DeFrancis uses "zhuyin zimu," zhuyin's original name and its translation, "Phonetic Alphabet" which is hardly unambiguous.) I'm never impressed with only raw Google counts so if there are quality linguistic sources preferring "bopomofo," please cite them. As for the argument that "it is odd to romanize the name using a competing phonetic system," I can hardly imagine using zhuyin symbols themselves to write the article title. — AjaxSmack 04:37, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

Usage by international organizations:

You can also do a general Google test, but that's WP:SET. --Voidvector (talk) 08:36, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

  • We're going to have to romanize it with a competing system regardless of which name we choose. I prefer zhuyin. "Bopomofo" is like saying "ABCs", or calling hangul giyeok-nieun. Okay, I know no-one calls hangul that, but still, "bopomofo" sounds like baby talk. It seems a little silly to use that when there's an actual name for it. kwami (talk) 09:56, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
    • In response to the hangul example, I would like to point out the English word "alphabet" is constructed from the pronunciation of the letters alpha and beta. The "baby talk" is a nonissue when you consider most English speakers would struggle when pronouncing "zhuyin". In addition, in terms of prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics, "bomopofo" is the more established name in English, so it is the more descriptive word for this concept, while "zhuyin" is more prescriptive word (since it is dictated from the Chinese translation). --Voidvector (talk) 14:08, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
"Alphabet" is not conceived of as the names of letters, but simply as a name. "Bopomopho", on the other hand, is clearly simply a series of letter names. "Zhuyin" is no harder to pronounced than "bopomofo". kwami (talk) 16:33, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
Etymology of alphabet. --Voidvector (talk) 04:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Obviously. But that's irrelevant. kwami (talk) 16:22, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Just trying to point out that the word "alphabet" WAS conceived of the names of letters, contrary to what you said. --Voidvector (talk) 16:32, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
No, I said it isn't, not it wasn't. kwami (talk) 16:45, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
quote from that etymology page: "from Gk. alphabetos, from alpha + beta, the first two letters of it" --Voidvector (talk) 16:51, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, yes, obviously. But irrelevant. kwami (talk) 17:14, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
Kwami, there's really nothing wrong with the term "Bopomofo". In the world of implementation anyway we all use this term. Anybody who needs to use it (say, on a computer) will find that name. And that name will never go away. Actually, since Bopomofo is used for a number of Chinese languages it seems to me that Zhuyin is too specific. -- Evertype·✆ 09:31, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Usage by linguistic societies, as requested by AjaxSmask:

All the links I have listed are not Google tests, I am using Google to extract word usage information from the respective credible organization's websites. I feel that I would be cherry picking if I had picked only a few links from the Google search to show you. --Voidvector (talk) 05:12, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

A lot of these are listserv postings and the like which is fine for reflecting casual usage but not exactly what I had in mind. Maybe a few cites from those quaint old things made of paper would enlighten too. — AjaxSmack 05:40, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Those "listserv" entries are recorded emails from the mailing lists of that linguistic website. Those are some of the best examples of words used by linguists to communicate. I am not gonna go to the library for a simple move request, but here's one more usage information I gathered: New York Times --Voidvector (talk) 06:40, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Daniels & Bright mention it only briefly (five lines and a table), and call it the National Phonetic Alphabet. (I agree that's a bad name for us.) They then give Guóyīn Zìmǔ as the Chinese form and follow it with Bōpōmōfō as an alternate. The table is described as Bōpōmōfō, with diacritics. kwami (talk) 07:07, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Since "In everyday speech, zhuyin is known as bopomo or bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ)" (as it says in the article) I'm not sure why this move should be controversial. -- Evertype·✆ 09:36, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

What about the term "bopomofo" also being used for Hanyu Pinyin? kwami (talk) 11:23, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
I've never encountered that usage. Pinyin is always the term I have heard for pinyin. And Pinyin Romanized dictionaries are listed in ABC order not in BPMF order. -- Evertype·✆ 13:21, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
It was used to teach kids pinyin when I grew up (in the 80s), cause the consonant order rhymed better. And then, I was taught the Latin alphabet order right after cause had learn it to use the dictionary. --Voidvector (talk) 22:34, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
I heard this usage too, which confused me a lot. I thought the person was from Taiwan and was referring to Zhuyin Fuhao but she was from mainland China and was talking about Hanyu Pinyin. I'ts not standard but is used by some people.
I prefer Zhuyin name as well, no problem with zh- initial. IMO, Anglophones are now more trained to utter more or less accurate Chinese words/names, as most Chinese cities, provinces and names are spelled in English using pinyin. --Atitarev (talk) 23:13, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not convinced by User:Evertype's rationale that "since 'in everyday speech, zhuyin is known as bopomo or bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ)' (as it says in the article), I'm not sure why this move should be controversial." Flatulence is known as fart and sexual intercourse is known as fucking in everyday speech but it doesn't make for encyclopedic usage. Furthermore, in this case, the implication could be that bopomofo is common in everyday Chinese speech which might have bearing on English usage but does not necessarily determine it.
However, after reviewing a few more sources myself, I found that bopomofo is indeed used in more formal situations in English where the Chinese might use 注音符號 (Zhùyīn fúhào). Therefore, I will drop my opposition to the move. However, I still think zhuyin is a more encyclopedically appropriate term. As one website asks, "What is this bopomofo thing? Bopomofo is the sounding of the first four characters in the Chinese alphabetical system formally known as Zhuyin."[1] [my emphasis].
Here are some intersting web accessible references for each usage:
— AjaxSmack 23:59, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
We could move it with a disambiguation warning: this article is about the Chinese phonetic script formally known as zhuyin zimu. For the other Chinese phonetic script sometimes also called bopomofo, see hanyu pinyin.
kwami (talk) 01:52, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
Yeah but it hasn't been known as Zhùyīn zìmǔ for nearly a century. It's been Zhùyīn fúhào since 1930. — AjaxSmack 02:00, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
I am still perplexed over the usage of 注音字母 (zhuyin zimu) and 注音符号 (zhuyin fuhao). Mainland dictionaries tend to use 注音字母 (zhuyin zimu), which according to this article and the Chinese article is the old name. --Voidvector (talk) 03:07, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
The 1930 date is noted by DeFrancis in the following (unreferenced) passage from The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (p. 242):
The symbols were initially called Zhùyīn zìmǔ ("Phonetic Alphabet"); later they were also called Guóyīn zìmǔ ("National Phonetic Alphabet"). The fear that they might be considered an alphabetic system of writing independent of characters led in 1930 to their being renamed Zhùyīn Fúhào ("Phonetic Symbols").
Zhùyīn fúhào is also what's used in Taiwan published dictionaries and generally by Taiwanese when speaing Mandarin. The term zìmǔ ("letters") is reserved for letters of the Latin alphabet, &c. — AjaxSmack 08:42, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
I’ve never heard of bopomofo being used to refer to anything but Zhuyin Fuhao in my life. —Wiki Wikardo 10:14, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Usage in dialects other than Mandarin

Should that be languages rather than dialects? For example, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Mandarin are all mutually UNintelligible, making the proper classification among them as distinct languages rather than dialects of the same language. ludahai 魯大海 11:58, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

regardless of mutualy inteligibility, they are all descended from a common chinese language and are classified as dialects.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.84.131.194 (talk) 21:55, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Common descent is not an allowable scientific criterion for dinstinguishing dialects from languages. Historically, varieties such as Cantonese and Hakka have been called dialects for socio-political reasons and because the concept of a dialect in Chinese is not 100% the same as that in English. Not that English itself is consistent here, in some English speaking countries, "dialect" is used for anything that's not English. Anyway, the Chinese word for a dialect is 方言, a "regional speech". So the concept of dialect in Chinese is based more on the distinction between a regional and an over-regional variety. The popular interpretations of the word dialect in English aside, regionality is not commonly accepted as a scientific criterion and on the whole, only the degree of mutual intelligibility is.
If common ancestry were such a criterion, we would not have French and Italian but only Romance, Russian and Serbian would be Slavonic and Japanese and Korean would be Altaiic... not very practical or scientific.
It's also not true that all authors use the term dialect when referring to Cantonese, Hakka etc. Many Chinese authors writing in Chinese use 方言 as a technical term, and for a variety of reasons they often prefer "dialect" when writing in English. But overall the picture is varied. Using Cantonese as an example K. Tong and G. James in the Colloquial Cantonese (1994) course use the term language (for the above reasons), as does Siu-hing So in A Glossary of Common Cantonese Colloquial Expressions (2002), Ying-Ping Lee in Current Cantonese Colloquialisms (1998), C. Au Scott in Communicate in Cantonese (1994), Kwan Choi Wah in The Right Word in Cantonese (1996) and so on. I actually have to go back to the 50s to find frequent references to Cantonese as a dialect, for example Chan Yeung Kwong Everybody's Cantonese (1947).
Even mainland chinese books today often use 语 "language" rather than 话 (dialect) when talking about Cantonese, for example 杨明新 简明粤英词典 (1999) as opposed to 李榮 廣州方言詞典 (2000) (although the latter arguable deals with the Cantonese dialect of Canton rather than Cantonese overall).
I think the modern scientific usage (at least in English) is definitely in the language camp rather than the dialect camp. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:35, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

ludahai, this talk page is not a forum for promoting reasons on taiwanese independence, like the fact taiwanese is a seperate language. your statement does not belong here.ㄏㄨㄤㄉㄧ (talk) 14:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Display problems

I find that in the table, the three dialect symbols (for v, ng and ny - that is, those that should be encoded in the Unicode bopomofo block as U+312A..U+312C) display incorrectly, as empty rectangles. Similarly for the old characters in the explanations for u: 'ㄨ u, w From 㐅', ancient form of 五 wǔ' and o: 'ㄛ o From the obsolete character ' hē, inhalation, the reverse of 丂 kǎo'. All other characters and Bopomofo symbols on this page display correctly. Have I perhaps set up my CJK display wrongly? Alternatively, is there a systematic problem with the page or the CSS styles used on it? FYI, I'm using Windows XP SP3, and have successfully implemented Chinese IMEs in Microsoft Word 2000. yoyo (talk) 14:55, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Most likely just a font problem. You might want to check into getting a font that covers more of the unicode range, though may be a problem. kwami (talk) 15:36, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Kwami, thanks for the suggestion - could you name a suitable font? And yes, is a problem - I see only a square.
Corrections to my earlier observations -
  1. Symbols for 'V', 'Ng' and 'Gn' (presumably = ny?) given in a table under Chinese dialects and languages other than Standard Mandarin do display correctly. I propose to copy those symbols to update the symbols for 'v', 'ng' and 'ny' in the Origins ... table, if there are no objections.
  2. In the same (dialect) section, all the symbols in the Extended zhuyin table also fail to display correctly, appearing as empty rectangles. Any user, please emend this table if you can.
  3. In the Origin of the letters section, the symbol for 'the apical vowel' (sic - what's that in IPA?) also displays as an empty rectangle. Any user, please emend this symbol if you can.
yoyo (talk) 15:58, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Check out Unicode typefaces. kwami (talk) 16:21, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

"Republic of China of Taiwan"

I don't know if "Republic of China of Taiwan" at the top of the article is a typo (s/or/and/) or if it intended to say "Republic of China (aka Taiwan)".

Either way, improvement is still needed... e.g. "People's Republic of China and Taiwan", OR "Taiwan (aka Republic of China)" —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bobbozzo (talk • contribs) 23:33, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Not much relevance...

Sorry, but I'm trying to learn Mandarin, but my computer can't render v/vo, ny, and ng. Anything I can do? It renders v/vo as ㄪ, ng as ㄫ, and ny as ㄬ. Help! Moocowsrule (talk) 06:18, 9 October 2008 (UTC)moocowsrule

You copied the letters just fine, so your computer isn't the problem. I suspect you just need a better font. But those three letters aren't used in Standard Mandarin anyway. kwami (talk) 07:42, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
I copied the weird symbols that are boxes with letters in them. V/vo reads as 31 2A, ng reas as 31 2B, and ny reads as 31 2C... I read them just fine in a Unicode PDF file which had the Bopomofo characters, but on here my computer can't render them. I have XP Home, with East Asian characters installed, and all the Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji/Hanja/Cangjie, and Hangul read perfectly fine. But these three won't read. And it's annoying... but I guess I'm not going to learn less-Standard Mandarin (is that the non-Standard equivalent of Standard Mandarin???) till way later.
And also some of these characters look a lot like Hiragana or Katakana... like "ㄑ" "q" which looks like "く" which "ku" sounds a bit like "q". And "ㄘ" which looks like "ち" "c" which looks like "Chi". And "ㄙ" "s" which looks like "ム" "mu", which doesn't sound like "s"... And there are a lot more...
Plus "ih" won't render... It renders as "ㄭ" or "31 2D"... But I got the basic idea of what "ih" should look like...Moocowsrule (talk) 06:34, 10 October 2008 (UTC)moocowsrule
ih was added to Unicode only recently, so most current fonts won't support it. Nevertheless, here is a list of all bopomofo symbols in Unicode. --Voidvector (talk) 01:08, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Gosh, missed the move discussion

but Bopomofo is a bad name compared to Zhuyin for lack of precision. "Bopomofo" was how I was taught Hanyu pinyin, and it is a widespread colloquial name for the scheme. I can see from the above discussion that I am not alone in this experience. As to those who say "I've never heard of hanyu pinyin being called bomopofo": well, ignorance of existence is not proof of non-existence.

Just my thoughts. Since it has been newly minted, I'll wait a little before proposing a move back. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 23:06, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it does seem that bopomofo just means "ABCs", no matter which script is being used. Not used that way in English, but could still cause confusion. I mildly support moving back to zhuyin, which AFAIK is unambiguous. kwami (talk) 23:36, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation Audio File

Could someone record a speaker recording the bopomofo "alphabet" for WikiCommons? It would be good to have a reference, especially for those who want to learn it.

There are recordings available at http://www.chinese-lessons.com/download.htm under Creative Commons license. I'm not sure how this particular license is compatible with Wikipedia, but the author might be willing to change it just for WikiCommons. --Cababunga (talk) 20:20, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Rubbish

QUOTE: "Unlike pinyin, the sole purpose for zhuyin in elementary education is to teach Standard Mandarin pronunciation to children."

Absolute rubbish. In the PRC, they teach pinyin to schoolchildren first before they begin to teach more complex characters. I went to school in China. How do you think we cope with learning characters if we do not even know how they sound? We aren't born with that kind of knowledge. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs 11:17, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Agree. Changed the sentence to "Bopomofo remains main phonetic system used for teaching reading and writing in elementary school on Taiwan." Cababunga (talk) 03:19, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Note on "bopomofo"

"Bopomofo", the colloquial name of Zhuyin, are also the first four syllables of the official Hanyu pinyin scheme. As a result, it is also sometimes colloquially used to refer to Pinyin in mainland China (instead of Zhuyin, which has all but disappeared in mainland China). To avoid confusion, that name should be used sparingly. --Sumple (Talk) 07:03, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

The term "zhuyin" is not correct either. In Taiwan the informal way that people who are not teachers (or pedants?) refer to it is "bo po mo fo". The term you will find in the dictionary is 注音符號 or NPA (national phonetic alphabet). P0M 03:13, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm from Hong Kong. "bopomofo" makes me first think of pinyin but not zhuyin. Also, I think it's better to rename this page as its official title; as I'm afraid that it would confuse foreign English speakers. (I came to this page by searching 'Zhuyin' and it turned to a page named 'bopomofo', which puzzled me:) I suggest to create a 'bopomofo' diverging page for both 'pinyin' and 'zhuyin'. Hermesw (talk) 17:24, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Usage

QUote: Zhuyin will probably never replace Traditional Chinese just as hiragana has never replaced characters in Japanese texts even though it substituting hiragana for characters is always an option. Not only are the characters valued for esthetic and other axiological reasons, but (once they have been learned) reading characters required fewer eye fixations and eliminates the ambiguities in any alphabetic or syllabic writing system caused by the immense number of homonyms in Chinese. (Reading Chinese in a phonetic representation is like trying to understand a spoken English sentence containing a string of homonyms such as: "For afore Forry called four 'Fores!'..." because almost any spelled-out "word" maps to more than one Chinese character. In English, we use different spellings of one sound such as "for" to differentiate the intended meanings. In zhuyin -- minus the word "called" -- that would look something like the following ㄈㄡㄦㄚㄈㄡㄦㄈㄡㄦㄧ... ㄈㄡㄦㄈㄡㄦㄗ.) end quote

This statement seems to have missed the fact that tonal marks are (or can be) used to show the difference between tones...

True, but the addition of tone marks has not been enough to make reading any non-character rendering comfortable for readers who know hanzi.

Even with tones, there are still hundreds of homonyms.-- Baoluo 05:50, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

If Hanzi was replaced by an alphabetic or syllabic writing system, then written Chinese would change, eg less use of single syllable words etc. If it can be understood read aloud then it can be written down with an alphabetic or syllabic writing system without any confusion at all. LDHan 11:38, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

response to top most comment in this section- just use special accent marks to show the different tones and homonyms..... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.84.131.194 (talk) 22:02, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

No, as shown in Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den, the accent marks does not help. --DyChen 01:01 02-Sep-2009.
How does it show it does not help? Also, how is this section relevant to the article? --LjL (talk) 11:23, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Jhuyin Fuhao

I noticed that someone recently changed "Zhuyin" to "Jhuyin" in this article with the reason that Jhuyin is the official name in Taiwan. Unless something has changed since the beginning of this year, Hanyu is currently the official romanization system in Taiwan. I'm new to Wikipedia, but I'm going to go ahead and change it back to "Zhuyin", unless someone can find a source for "Jhuyin" being the correct spelling. 76.76.228.180 (talk) 11:30, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm the user above. I just reverted another change back to "Zhuyin". The only reason that the rest of the island of Taiwan uses other forms of pinyin is that Tongyong was the official system of the Republic of China from 2002-2008. Taipei chose not to adopt this system, and thus was one of the only places in the ROC that used Hanyu. Now Hanyu is the ROC's national standard for romanization. The Pinyin article has multiple sources to this effect. Also, there's this http://www.cepd.gov.tw/encontent/m1.aspx?sNo=0010994&key=&ex=%20&ic=&cd= article from the government. Bopomofo was created by the ROC, and in my opinion we should use either the international standard for romanizing Chinese characters (which is Hanyu Pinyin) or the official ROC standard (which is also Hanyu Pinyin) to describe matters pertaining to the ROC. Seems like a no-brainer. Dempf (talk) 15:39, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

ㄭ

Why is "ih" on here? San Min Zhu Yi (talk) 23:46, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

removals: "Zhuyin's Mainlander equivalent is pinyin."

Removed: "Zhuyin's Mainlander equivalent is pinyin." Pinyin is a romanization system, which is often employed for different purposes. (No signs in Taiwan are in zhuyin!) --Jiang

  • But pinyin and zhuyin are equivalents in terms of use in dictionaries and textbooks. And yes, there are some sign annotations in zhuyin in Taiwan, especially at educational exhibits in museums and the like. Just because one kind of item (street signs) isn't in zhuyin doesn't mean the two systems aren't basically equivalent in purpose. Dragonbones (talk) 07:02, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the mere fact that pinyin is a romanization and zhuyin is not would indicate that the two systems are not basically equivalent in purpose, despite the fact that the two systems are both used to show the pronunciation of Chinese characters in dictionaries and textbooks. LDHan (talk) 14:42, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

One of pinyin's use is indeed romanization. But that's the most common use that westerners see. Pinyin is taught for pronunciation and transcribing purposes in elementary school in mainland China. As someone who went through elementary school there, I can attest that pinyin's primary purpose is the same as that of zhuyin. Finally, pinyin was created to replace pinyin not to romanize the Chinese language. 67.173.11.145 (talk) 01:56, 31 May 2010 (UTC) <- [Forgot to sign in] Misosoup7 (talk) 01:57, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Alphabet status

Hi, does anyone has any linguistic articles that backs up the claim the example in the second paragraph in the article? How do we define the phoneme in Chinese? The examples that "an" is not a shortest possible segment, but that's purely by western standards since an "a" (ㄚ) and "n" (ㄋ) both exists. "an" in Chinese makes a single sound. But "a" + "n" the obvious break, will sound completely different, something like "ah-ne". I guess I'm trying to say ㄚ+ㄋ is not the same as ㄢ. I'm not a linguist or anything, so I was just wondering if there was some literature on the claim. Misosoup7 (talk) 02:07, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I think people are generally opposed to the idea that the nature of languages is determined by the script they are written in. But of course people writing in that script will be guided by its conventions! Should Vietnamese have the phonemes it does only because it switched to the Latin alphabet? If it were still written in hanzi, would the nature of the spoken language be any different? To me at least, ㄢ sounds very much like ㄚㄋ. — kwami (talk) 02:29, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Stroke order for ㄖ and ㄓ

Is it really commonly accepted that ㄖ has 3 strokes (rather than the expected 4 strokes had it been a 漢字). For example, in this animation from the Ministry of Education in Taiwan it has 4 strokes: [7] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.235.234.81 (talk) 00:51, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I am not the poster above, but I do verify that the learning web of the Ministry of Education in Taiwan [8] lists 4 strokes as the first entry for ㄖ, and 3 strokes as a variant. Ditto for ㄓ where 4 strokes is listed as the first entry [9] and 3 strokes as a variant.
Also the 常用國字標準字體筆順手冊 (which is listed as an authoritative source for the stroke order graphics (e.g. [10])) does back up the statement above that 4 strokes are expected had ㄖ been a 漢字. (See Rule no.9).
I'd also say that although the rule does not directly apply to ㄓ, 出 which is of similar shape is listed in Rule no.16 with a stroke order supporting the 4 strokes variant. Juxtap (talk) 09:50, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Letters vs. Symbols

From the first paragraph: Consisting of 37 letters and 4 tone marks,...

Isn't symbols a better term than letters here, to be consistent with the name Zhùyīn Fúhào ("Phonetic Symbols")?

See also: History section, name change from Zhùyīn Zìmǔ ("Phonetic Alphabet") to Zhùyīn Fúhào ("Phonetic Symbols"). Juxtap (talk) 10:09, 9 July 2010 (UTC)

Pinyin always yields the same alphabetic spelling

Does anyone know what this is supposed to mean?: "Unlike bopomofo, the pinyin system always yields the same alphabetic spelling, so it has become more popular in transliterating Chinese characters in English texts." I'm having a lot of trouble trying to make sense of it. It wouldn't make sense in the first place to use zhuyin in transliterating characters in English because English speakers wouldn't have the slightest idea how to read them. Is this line just trying to say that pinyin uses Latin letters, while zhuyin doesn't, or is it something more than that? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.36.145.125 (talk) 16:54, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree that this makes no sense whatsoever, since bopomofo makes no attempt to be a romanisation, and has no relation with any. As an alphabet, it is perfectly consistent within itself, so the statement isn't true. Also, the fact that pinyin is more popular than bopomofo for transliterating into English is sufficiently obvious that the sentence is not relavent to this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RitKill (talk • contribs) 17:33, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Remove statement about non-official status

The MOE regulation in 2009 abolished non Hanyu Pinyin, but didn't abolish zhuyin.

http://english.moe.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=11752&ctNode=424&mp=1

Roadrunner (talk) 06:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Initial and Finals

Analytic syllable (σ) structure: tree diagram comprising several phonologic traditions and theories

The article completely fails to describe how either

  1. initials (ι) and finals (φ) or
  2. initials (ι), medials (µ) and rimes (ρ) or
  3. onsets (ω) and rimes (ρ)

are employed in this system and in which way they correspond to the pinyins. For instance, the 瓶子 (ㄆㄧㄥ́ㄗ̇) píngzi ‘bottle’ example should be either *piéngzi or *pyíngzi according to the mapping tables. — Christoph Päper 07:13, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

The correspondences between these finals in Zhuyin Fuhao and Hanyu Pinyin are actually described in the table "Bopomofo vs. Pinyin" on the page. For instance, "瓶子" would fall under "ㄧㄥ": ying 【ing】 ying 【ing】 ying 【ing】 英 (ㄧㄥ, yīng). I've altered the left-hand column to make those rows more visible.
The heading doesn't say that the table is a mapping table, though, but rather a "comparison", so we have no guarantee that the table's meant to completely detail all the correspondences between the two systems.

As for the phonological analysis with the medials and onsents and rimes and so on; that's not what this article refers to when it refers to "initials" and "finals". The article uses the division into "initials" and "finals" that's common in the context of Chinese phonology. See for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese#Phonology and the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_%28linguistics%29 ("the combination of medial and rime is collectively known as the final"). Rōnin (talk) 20:34, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
After your edit, the first table makes more sense. Thanks.
I’ve split the rows which had bracketed alternatives, but I’m not sure I understood (and hence labeled) the difference correctly. I assumed the non-bracketed variant to be used if the character (sequence) is used in isolation and the bracketed variant otherwise.
Actually the diagram reflects the use of “final’ and “rime” as used in the articles you linked to, and it assumes that “onset” is not an alternate name for “initial” but rather contains it (and the medial).
The thing I don’t understand yet completely is medials, which result in the characters the bracketed and non-bracketed transliterations differ in. When are they used? Is it when those syllables occur in isolation as I made the table suggest? — Christoph Päper 10:20, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
The difference between the bracketed transcriptions and the non-bracketed transcriptions is that the latter occur when the syllables are isolated, yes. The initial "y" or "w" probably serves to reduce ambiguity by marking the beginning of a new syllable. For instance, "nà・yàng" ("that way") can be differentiated from "nài・àng". Hanyu Pinyin also uses an apostrophy in some cases, for instance "西安" is transcribed as "Xi'an", to differentiate it from the single syllable "xian".

However, this convention is an artifact of various other transcription system such as Hanyu Pinyin, and not something that separates these specific finals into a category of their own. In fact, several of the other finals can occur in isolation as well, including ㄞ (as in "ㄞˋ", "love"). ㄢ (as in "ㄢ", "peace" and of course "ㄒㄧㄢ", "Xi'an") and ㄦ (as in "ㄦˊㄗ˙", "son"). The bracketed and non-bracketed transcriptions are phonemically speaking equivalent, just as "an" and "'an" are phonemically equivalent, and coming up with a new system for categorizing them would require a good deal of insight into Chinese phonology, and on top of it all also constitute original research. Thus, I have reverted the table to its previous form, in the advent of a paper or article wich provides a better explanation. Rōnin (talk) 11:59, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

By the way, with the initials ㄓ, ㄔ, ㄕ, ㄗ, ㄘ, ㄙ, and ㄖ, the problem is slightly different – As far as I can see, these are the only characters that can both constitute an initial and an entire syllable, but does that make them "initials in isolation", "initials followed by the empty rime", or something else? Determining this on our own would also border on original research.

The bottom line is that the article is targeted at people who are already familiar with the phonemic inventory of Mandarin Chinese, and that making it accessible to a more general audience would take a good deal of expertise. Rōnin (talk) 12:32, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Requested move (2012) I

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus to move. Favonian (talk) 10:45, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Bopomofo → Zhuyin – Per WP:COMMONNAME, naturalness, precision, and consistency. The proper name of the subject is "Zhuyin fuhao" while the common name is "zhuyin." "Bopomofo" is slang, and is merely the approximate sound of the first four initials of the Mandarin language, rather than the name of the system as "pinyin" is. This name is therefore ambiguous and not specific to the zhuyin system: as the article states, "bopomofo" could very well mean pinyin instead. Google search shows 1,800,000 for "zhuyin" and 610,000 for "bopomofo". Google Books similarly shows 4,250 for "zhuyin" and 1,380 for "bopomofo". --Jiang (talk) 10:20, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

  • Comment. "Bopomofo" is the name used by both ISO and on the Unicode chart, so I wouldn't call it slang. Google Books is split down the middle. I get 323 (119 deghosted) post-2000 English-language GBook hits for zhuyin phonetic, 133 (73 deghosted) for bopomofo phonetic. Kauffner (talk) 17:20, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
    • I don't know why you would need to add the word "phonetic" to your search. I think common usage and precision here overwhelmingly overrides the conventions used by specialists.--Jiang (talk) 19:30, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
      • Huge, unrealistic result numbers like 1.8 million are overwhelmingly ghost hits. If you look at your GBook results, you will find many books in Chinese. Kauffner (talk) 00:19, 15 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment Googling for "Zhuyin Fuhao" produced about 22,000 hits. Googling for "Zhuying" produced 102,000 hits. Googling for "bopomofo" produced about 1,800,000 hits. Readin (talk) 20:18, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
bopomofo, Zhuyin, Zhuyin fuhao Readin (talk) 20:34, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I notice that you put quotes around your search and that seems to make a big difference even for a single word. Please fix my ignorance, what do the quotes do? Readin (talk) 20:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
The quotes are used to search for the exact phrase - when there is only one word, it does nothing. What I did do that made a big difference is adding "-wikipedia" so that the results would not be skewed by Wikipedia or its mirror sites. [11] --Jiang (talk) 20:50, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I would have thought that the quotes wouldn't do anything when only one word is used, but it did do something. I got a different number of results searching for "bopomofo" instead of bopomofo. Readin (talk) 21:37, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
There is only a marginal difference. I'm not exactly sure why - but the google count is an estimate, not an actual tally of the results. The real difference is when "-wikipedia" is added.--Jiang (talk) 21:48, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Oppose Per the Google results plus my own experience - I find that when using English far more people understand me when I say "bopomofo" than when I say "Zhuyin". Readin (talk) 20:18, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
  • Comment. "Bopomofo" is clearly the more common name in English. I think a more convincing argument would be that it does not actually mean zhuyin, but can refer to any phonetic script, including pinyin. However, it doesn't have that use in English. — kwami (talk) 20:57, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
I actually prefer zhuyin myself. But my impression is that bopomofo is more common. I'm not taking sides this time. — kwami (talk) 22:31, 14 April 2012 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Bopomofo referring to Pinyin and other systems

This may seem related to the RM, but I'm asking mostly to determine whether the statements should stay in the article text. The article says "for those who first encountered a different system, such as hanyu pinyin, "bopomofo" usually means that system first encountered" and "the same sequence (bopomofo) is used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems. For example, it is a colloquial name for Hanyu pinyin in mainland China".

I know from asking older people that bopomofo is indeed used to refer to Zhuyin Fuhao in their generation, but I find it unlikely that it'd also be used to refer to Pinyin in China, since the symbols in Pinyin intrinsically have pronunciations (from English) already. So can we get a source for these claims (or alternatively, someone from China who can confirm that it is indeed the case)? Thanks. wctaiwan (talk) 04:20, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I can only provide anecdotal support at this point but I can confirm anecdotally through my schooling in China that pinyin is indeed first introduced to students as "bopomofo", since those are the first four syllables in the list of pinyin syllables. Pinyin is not taught in the sequence "a, b, c, d", but in the sequence "b(o), p(o), m(o), f(o), d(e), t(e), n(e), l(e), g(e), k(e)..." etc. Hence why they are introduced as the "bopomofo", somewhat analogously to how the English alphabet might be referred to as the "ABCs".
(As an aside, while many people call pinyin characters by their equivalent English names because of increased familiarity with English, the pinyin characters actually have a different set of official names, which are closer to their Latin/French pronunciations than English ones.) --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 09:26, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
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