On the Progress of Phonemic Analysis of Chinese Word Syllables

Abstract

Sound notation of sinographs has been a problem since the sinographs were in use. For a long time there was no appropriate method to indicate the pronunciation of sinographs to learners. With the design of different methods of sinograph sound notation, such as Direct Notation, Fan-qie, the National Sound Notation Alphabet, the Scheme of the Chinese Phonemic Alphabet, the analysis of the Chinese word syllable has developed, with an increasingly delicated segmentation in the Chinese syllable. The latter three methods, which cut the Chinese word syllable into two, three and four parts respectively, have been designed under the influence of foreign linguistics scholarship. Communications between China and India and European countries have been an impetus for the progress in Chinese syllabic analysis.