Pinyin, short for Hanyu Pinyin, which means "phonetic
notation" or "phonetic symbols" while Pin
means "spell(ing)" and Yin means "sound(s)"),
is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription
to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin. Pinyin was approved
in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by the government in the People's
Republic of China. It superseded older romanization systems
such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1912) and Postal System
Pinyin, and replaced zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic
instruction in mainland China.
Since then, Pinyin has been accepted by the
Government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American
Library Association, and most international institutions
as the preferred transcription system for Mandarin. In 1979
the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese
(ISO-7098:1991).
Pinyin is a romanization and not an anglicization;
that is, it uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard
Mandarin Chinese. The way these letters represent sounds
in Standard Mandarin Chinese will differ from how other
languages that use the Roman alphabet represent sound. For
example, the sounds indicated in Pinyin by b and p are distinguished
from each other (by aspiration) in a manner different from
that of both English (which has voicing and aspiration)
and of French (which has voicing alone). Other letters,
like j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond
to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions
in Pinyin such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English
pronunciations, either. Pinyin has also become a useful
tool for entering Chinese language text into computers.
When learning Chinese Pinyin, you shall be
aware of certain limitations:
