Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitled Xizi Qiji (西字奇蹟; 'Miracle of Western Letters') and published in Beijing in 1605. Twenty years later, fello… See more

Unlike European languages, clusters of letters—initials (声母; 聲母; shēngmǔ) and finals (韵母; 韻母; yùnmǔ)—and not consonant and vowel letters, form the basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems us… See more

The pinyin system also uses four diacritics to mark the tones of Mandarin. In the pinyin system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à. And there is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone: a. Th… See more

Standard Chinese has many polysyllabic words. Like in other writing systems using the Latin alphabet, spacing in pinyin is officially based on word boundaries. However, there are often ambiguities in partitioning … See more

Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks, as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in bopomofo. … See more