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| ==Romanization== | | ==Plurals== |
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| As stated above, written Chinese is not phonetic. In other words, specific phonemes, letters or sounds typically cannot be derived from simply looking at a Chinese character. Traditionally in China, knowing how a specific character was pronounced was largely only achieved by memorization. Romanization - namely, the process of transcribing or transliterating a language into Latin script - was first applied to the Chinese language by Christian missionaries working in China during the 16th century. One of the most widely used Chinese romanization systems developed in the late 19th century is the Wade-Giles system, which was the standard of transcription for the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century. In 1956, just two years after the implementation of simplified characters, the government of the People’s Republic of China introduced the hanyu pinyin (漢語拼音hàn yǔ pīn yīn) romanization system in an additional effort to boost literacy. Pinyin later became the standard romanization for China, and more recently for Taiwan and Singapore. <br>
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| Although the use of pinyin is becoming increasingly the standard for native and non-native Chinese speakers, the Wade-Giles and other romanization systems are still commonly found in history books, atlases, maps and other reference materials. Learning to differentiate the multiple systems can be helpful not only in research but also in the proper indexing of names for genealogical purposes. For instance, place names like Peking and Peiching all correspond to the characters 北京, which are now more commonly romanized in pinyin as the more familiar Beijing (běi jīng).
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| Romanization issues can also occur when researching or documenting proper names, e.g. Chinese surnames transliterated in Wade-Giles as Hsieh (謝), Chao (趙), Kuo (郭) and Chang (張) are transliterated in pinyin as Xie, Zhao, Guo and Zhang, respectively. This is further compounded when dealing with romanization of Cantonese names, as is common practice in Hong Kong, where these same four surnames may be transliterated as Tse, Chiu, Kwok and Cheung, respectively. A basic familiarity with the various romanization systems for Chinese is a critical component of doing genealogical research for Chinese names. Lacking such knowledge, a genealogist may erroneously create duplicate records for the same individual whose name has been romanized using another system or fail to recognize a match for an ancestor whose name was romanized differently. <br>
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| Because Chinese is a tonal language, romanization systems have also incorporated diacritic marks or spellings to account for each separate tone. Mandarin has four tones, which are represented by four different diacritic marks: ͞ (high), / (high rising), ˅ (low rising), and \ (falling). Here are some examples of the application of these diacritic marks in pinyin for the following words: Beijing (北京; běi jīng), China (中國; zhōng guó), husband (丈夫; zhàng fū), and so forth. When recording Chinese names from genealogical records, these diacritic marks are not necessary as they only correspond to the spoken language. Additional information regarding Mandarin tones can be found [https://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/section/17 here]. Tones for any of the Chinese characters found in this Glossary can be obtained by copying the characters into [https://translate.google.com/ Google Translate].
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| | Chinese in general does not have a plural form. The one consistent designation of the plural occurs with pronouns by means of adding the character 們 (men) to singular pronouns to make them plural pronouns as follows: |
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| | {| width="70%" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" border="0" class="FCK__ShowTableBorders" |
| | |- |
| | | class="xl25" | '''Singular Pronoun''' |
| | | class="xl25" | '''English''' |
| | | class="xl25" | '''Plural Pronoun w/ 們''' |
| | | class="xl25" | '''English''' |
| | |- |
| | | class="xl24" | 我 (wǒ) |
| | | class="xl24" | I/me |
| | | class="xl24" | 我們 (wǒ men) |
| | | class="xl24" | We |
| | |- |
| | | class="xl24" | 你 (nǐ) |
| | | class="xl24" | You |
| | | class="xl24" | 你們 (nǐ men) |
| | | class="xl24" | You (plural) |
| | |- |
| | | class="xl24" | 他 (tā) |
| | | class="xl24" | He/him |
| | | class="xl24" | 他們 (tā men) |
| | | class="xl24" | They/them |
| | |- |
| | | class="xl24" | 她 (tā) |
| | | class="xl24" | She/her |
| | | class="xl24" | 她們 (tā men) |
| | | class="xl24" | They/them (fem.) |
| | |- |
| | |} |
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| [[Category:Word List]] | | [[Category:Word List]] |