Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Chinese pronunciations

Here's a chart I made (thanks to Frank for suggesting suffixes and prefixes I forgot about) after becoming curious as to why there are are characters pronounced "jiang" and "liang," for example, but not "miang." You can also go to http://www.stanford.edu/~bgwines/Hanzi to see the whole chart as one instead of as split into there. 



Of course, the next question after making the chart was, what's the proportion of pronunciations that do exist to those that don't but hypothetically could! It turns out it's 407:385, which means 51.38% of pronunciations exist.

In the process of making the chart, I ran into a few pronunciations that I never knew existed:
• 拽 zhuai1 (only two characters pronounced zhuai)
• 欻 chua1 (the only character that's pronounced chua; it's an onomatopoeic sound)
• 龊 chuo4
• 剖 pou1 (only five characters  pronounced pou)
• 虐 nue4  (only two characters, pronounced nue, and there's some ambiguity as to the pronunciation should be romanized as nüe, instead, which makes more sense based on how -ü is pronounced. 战略的略 would also be -üe, but 确实的确 or, actually, any other que is definitely -ue, not -üe. But most 输入软件 don't distinguish the two for nue, but only list lue, not lüe. Since there are only two characters pronounced nue/nüe, I just decided to list this character under -ue so as to not make a whole 'nother column, which would have brought the existent : non-existent ratio to 407:399)

Also, some very common characters like 嗲, 得, 能 and 谁(alt. pronunciation: shui3) are either the only within their pronunciation group or one of very few (能 is the only neng anybody is likely to ever see outside of a list of all nengs, the others are 而(多音字!), 竜, 耐(也是耐心的耐) and 螚). It's not uncommon for pronunciation groups to restrict themselves only to certain tones, i.e. there's only shuo1 and shuo4, no second or third tone.

The hyphens represent a non-existent pronunciation, and the characters are (more or less) arbitrarily chosen from all the characters that are pronounced a particular way.

Note: I couldn't type the only biang, of course, but you can see it here.


a
ai
an
ao
ang
e
ei
en
er
eng
i

b
c
ch
d
f
g
h
j
k
l
m
n
p
q
r
s
sh
t
w
x
西
y
z
zh


ia
ie
in
iu
ian
iao
ing
iang
iong
o
ou

b
便
biang1
c
ch
d
f
g
h
j
k
l
m
n
p
q
r
s
sh
t
w
x
y
z
zh


ong
ü
ue
u
ui
uo
un
ua
uai
uan
uang

b
c
ch
d
f
g
h
怀
j
k
l
绿
m
n
p
q
r
s
sh
t
w
x
y
z
zh


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