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How did you start your learning of written Chinese? Can you read“篪”(chi) and“扃”(jiong) without the help of Pinyin?
Most of us start learning Chinese by reading Pinyin. Whenever we come across a new character, we will have to turn to Pinyin for its pronunciation. The Chinese characters and their pronunciations seem to be so separate from each other that we rely on Pinyin to bridge the discrepancy.
The alphabetic languages such as English are different from Chinese. Sometimes we can predict the sounds of an English word from its spelling. For example, you know how to read the word "sit" or "look" even at the first sight of them. But does that safely prove there is no discrepancy in English between spelling and pronunciation? Let's try the following.
Task. 2-1: Read the following rhyme aloud. Pay attention to the underlined words. Then check your pronunciation by referring to the phonetic transcription. See how much you can predict the pronunciation of each word by simply referring to its spelling.
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble but not you
On hiccough , thorough , lough and through
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard , a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead
For goodness' sake don't call it " deed "!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(they rhyme with suit and straight and debt ).
A moth is not a moth in mother ,
Nor both in bother , broth in brother .
Obviously, it is difficult to read every word correctly by simply referring to its spelling. Why? Because there are different types of discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation in the rhyme:
(1) Different letters/sequences of letters may represent the same sound:
(2) A single letter may represent different sounds:
(3) A combination of letters may represent a single sound:
(4) Some letters do not represent any sound at all:
Discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation annoys English speakers too. The great English writer George Bernard Shaw once said ironically that "ghoti" should have the same pronunciation as "fish", because in English "gh" can be pronounced as [f], "o" can be as [i] and "ti' as [ʃ]. Believe it or not, that is the case in
and
With his method, we may as well jokingly say that "phych" has the same pronunciation as "fish", because we can discover "ph" as [f] in
"y" as [i] in
and "ch" as [ʃ] in
So, if we cannot depend on the spelling of words to figure out their pronunciation, we will have to turn to other symbols to describe the speech sounds. The International Phonetic Association has worked out a system to explicitly represent pronunciation. The system, the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (IPA), is made up of a whole set of symbols based on Roman letters. The fundamental of IPA is to establish the one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds.
With the help of the IPA, we will be able to mark the pronunciation of each word. For example, "gh" in different words may take different sounds, but we may use the phonetic symbols to represent them:
tough [tʌf] bough [bau]
cough [kɔf] dough [dəu]
hiccough [hikʌp] thorough [θʌrə]
lough [lʌk] through [θruː]
To distinguish phonetic symbols from ordinary spelling, we use square brackets [ ] around the phonetic transcription alphabets.