Thursday, December 20, 2012

Mandarin Chinese Input

These days I was working on tranlating the system in Cantonese Chinese Input to Mandarin Chinese Input. The first step is to identify the consonants and vowels. There are very many different versions and after researching on the topic, I find these facts are most correct:
21 consonants plus 1 zero consonant meaning that the vowels are pronounced as they are:
‘b’, ‘p’, ‘m’, ‘f’, ‘d’, ‘t’, ‘n’, ‘l’, ‘g’, ‘k’, ‘h’, ‘z’, ‘c’, ‘s’, ‘zh’, ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘r’, ‘j’, ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘x’ is not considered as no consonant. ‘-’ can be used. ‘x’ is like ‘s’ but in mandarin, they are different in terms of emphasis, light/heavy s.
There are 38 vowels and in many versions, only 35 vowels as several vowels do not have their consonant part. The following is a scanned copy of Mr. Wong or Mr. Huang if pronounced in Mandarin:
List of Mandarin Vowels 
List of Mandarin Vowels
I organised the syllable table with the consonants and vowels with the single vowels addition as follows:
Mandarin Pinyin Syllable Table
Figure My mandarin Pinyin Syllable Table
I have verified with other versions:
One Pinyin Chart
One Pinyin Chart
Another Pinyin Chart
Another Pinyin Chart
More Pinyin Syllable Table
More Pinyin Syllable Table
Some versions add consonants ‘y’ and ‘w’ but the original scheme is to add ‘y’ and ‘w’ to the no consonant vowels like ‘u’ for ‘wu’ and ‘ü’ for ‘yu’ or even ‘ia’ as ‘ya’. Changing the syllable table makes pinyin more confusing.
Not all combinations are valid syllables and invalid ones are now excluded. Some version do a count to say the total is 412, some says 409 and I got 420 but some syllables do not have characters but maybe I have not found characters under those syllables, they are ‘lo’, ‘shong’, ‘rua’, ‘ruang’,’ nun’, ‘nia’, ‘lün’, ‘diang’, ‘ê’ for ‘e’, and ‘kei’. Some use ‘m’ and ‘n’ as vowels and will come to 420-10+2=412 as well. But with ‘ong’ being ‘weng’, there will only be 411. I am not sure about the 412 total for some version meant those syllables I listed. Please let me know for those who is knowledgeable in the area.
Please test drive my design at:
http://pcwong.org/mandarin/
and http://pcwong.org/mandarin/pinyin.html for pinyin input.
Have fun!

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