Bopomofo (), or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin (), is a Chinese transliteration system for

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in

Taiwanese Mandarin Taiwanese Mandarin, ''Guoyu'' ( zh, s=, t=國語, p=Guóyǔ, l=National Language, first=t) or ''Huayu'' ( zh, s=, t=華語, p=Huáyǔ, first=t, l=Mandarin Language, labels=no) refers to Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. A large majority of the T ...

, it may also be used to transcribe other

varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of mai ...

, particularly other varieties of Mandarin Chinese dialects, as well as

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/ Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about ...

. Consisting of 37 characters and five tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin. Bopomofo was first introduced in China by the Republican government in the 1910s and was used alongside the

Wade–Giles Wade–Giles () is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's '' Chinese–English Dictionary'' o ...

system for romanization purposes, which used a modified

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

. Today, Bopomofo is now more common in Taiwan than on the Chinese mainland, and is after

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

used as a secondary electronic input method for writing Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan as well as in dictionaries or other non-official documents.

Etymology

Bopomofo is the name used by the ISO and

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

. ''Zhuyin'' () literally means phonetic notation. The original formal name of the system was and . It was later renamed . In official documents, Bopomofo is occasionally called "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I" (), abbreviated as "MPS I" The system is often also called either ''Chu-in'' or ''the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols''. |Also available at A

romanized Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II). The name Bopomofo comes from the first four letters of the system: ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ and ㄈ. Similar to the way that the word "

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

" is ultimately derived from the names of the first two letters of the alphabet (

alpha Alpha (uppercase , lowercase ; grc, ἄλφα, ''álpha'', or ell, άλφα, álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , whi ...

and

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

), the name "Bopomofo" is derived from the first four syllables in the conventional ordering of available syllables in

. The four Bopomofo characters () that correspond to these syllables are usually placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is sometimes used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems.

History

Origins

The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called ''Zhuyin Zimu'', which was based on Zhang Binglin's shorthand. It was used as the official phonetic script to annotate the sounds of the characters in accordance with the pronunciation system called "

Old National Pronunciation The Old National Pronunciation () was the system established for the phonology of standard Chinese as decided by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation from 1913 onwards, and published in the 1919 edition of the ''Guóyīn Zìdiǎn ...

" (''Laoguoyin''). A draft was released on July 11, 1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education, but it was not officially proclaimed until November 23, 1928. It was later renamed first ''Guoyin Zimu'' and then, in April 1930, ''Zhuyin Fuhao''. The last renaming addressed fears that the alphabetic system might independently replace

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

Modern use

Bopomofo is the predominant phonetic system in teaching, reading and writing in

elementary school A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...

in Taiwan. It is also the most popular way for Taiwanese to enter Chinese characters into computers and

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

s and to look up characters in a dictionary. In elementary school, particularly in the lower years, Chinese characters in textbooks are often annotated with Bopomofo as

ruby character Ruby characters or rubi characters () are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Chinese ''hanzi'', Japanese ''kanji'', and Ko ...

s as an aid to learning. Additionally, one children's newspaper in Taiwan, the '' Mandarin Daily News'', annotates all articles with Bopomofo ruby characters. In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some overseas communities such as Filipino Chinese use Bopomofo. Bopomofo is shown in a secondary position to

in all editions of '' Xiandai Hanyu Cidian'' from the 1960 edition to the current 2016 edition (7th edition).

Symbols

The Bopomofo characters were created by Zhang Binglin, taken mainly from " regularized" forms of ancient Chinese characters, the modern readings of which contain the sound that each letter represents. The consonants are listed in order of place of articulation, from the front of the mouth to the back, /b/, /p/, /m/, /f/, /d/, /t/, /n/, /l/ etc.

Writing

Stroke order

Bopomofo is written in the same

stroke order Stroke order is the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character (or Chinese derivative character) are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface. Chinese characters are used in various forms in Chine ...

rule as Chinese characters. Note that is written with three strokes, unlike the character from which it is derived (), which has four strokes. can be written as a vertical line () or a horizontal line (); both are accepted forms. Traditionally, it should be written as a horizontal line in vertical writing, and a vertical line in horizontal writing. The People's Republic of China almost exclusively uses horizontal writing, so the vertical form (in the rare occasion that Bopomofo is used) has become the standard form there. Language education in Taiwan generally uses vertical writing, so most people learn it as a horizontal line, and use a horizontal form even in horizontal writing. In 2008, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education decided that the primary form should always be the horizontal form, but that the vertical form is accepted alternative. Unicode 8.0.0 published an errata in 2014 that updates the representative glyph to be the horizontal form. Computer fonts may only display one form or the other, or may be able to display both if the font is aware of changes needed for vertical writing. File:ㄅ-bw.png File:ㄆ-bw.png File:ㄇ-bw.png File:ㄈ-bw.png File:ㄉ-bw.png File:ㄊ-bw.png File:ㄋ-bw.png File:ㄌ-bw.png File:ㄍ-bw.png File:ㄎ-bw.png File:ㄏ-bw.png File:ㄐ-bw.png File:ㄑ-bw.png File:ㄒ-bw.png File:ㄓ-bw.png File:ㄔ-bw.png File:ㄕ-bw.png File:ㄖ-bw.png File:ㄗ-bw.png File:ㄘ-bw.png File:ㄙ-bw.png File:ㄚ-bw.png File:ㄛ-bw.png File:ㄜ-bw.png File:ㄝ-bw.png File:ㄞ-bw.png File:ㄟ-bw.png File:ㄠ-bw.png File:ㄡ-bw.png File:ㄢ-bw.png File:ㄣ-bw.png File:ㄤ-bw.png File:ㄥ-bw.png File:ㄦ-bw.png File:ㄧ-bw.png File:ㄨ-bw.png File:ㄩ-bw.png File:ㄭ-bw.png

Tonal marks

As shown in the following table, tone marks for the second, third, and fourth tones are shared between bopomofo and

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

. In bopomofo, the mark for first tone is usually omitted but can be included, while a dot above indicates the fifth tone (also known as the neutral tone). In pinyin, a macron (overbar) indicates the first tone, and the lack of a marker usually indicates the fifth (light) tone. Unlike Hanyu Pinyin, Bopomofo aligns well with the Chinese characters in books whose texts are printed vertically, making Bopomofo better suited for annotating the pronunciation of vertically oriented Chinese text. When used in conjunction with Chinese characters, Bopomofo is typically placed to the right of the Chinese character vertically in both vertical print and horizontal print or to the top of the Chinese character in a horizontal print (see

Ruby character Ruby characters or rubi characters () are small, annotative glosses that are usually placed above or to the right of logographic characters of languages in the East Asian cultural sphere, such as Chinese ''hanzi'', Japanese ''kanji'', and Ko ...

s).

Example

Below is an example for the word "bottle" ():

Erhua transcription

Words rhotacized as a result of

erhua Erhua ( ); also called erization or rhotacization of syllable finals) is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "er" (注音：, common words: 、、) sound (transcribed in IPA as ) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin () i ...

are spelled with attached to the syllable (like ). In case the syllable uses other tones than the 1st tone, the tone mark is attached to the penultimate letter standing for syllable nucleus, but not to (e.g. ; ; ).

Comparison

Pinyin

Bopomofo and

are based on the same Mandarin pronunciations; hence there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two systems: ¹ Not written. ² is written as after , , , or . ³ / is written as / after /, /, /, /. ⁴ is pronounced (written as ) when it follows an initial.

Chart

Use outside Standard Mandarin

Bopomofo symbols for non-Mandarin

Chinese varieties Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...

are added to Unicode in the

Bopomofo Extended Bopomofo Extended is a Unicode block containing additional Bopomofo characters for writing phonetic Min Nan, Hakka Chinese, Cantonese, Hmu, and Ge. The basic set of Bopomofo characters can be found in the Bopomofo block. Block History The f ...

block.

Taiwanese Hokkien

In Taiwan, Bopomofo is used to teach

, and is also used to transcribe it phonetically in contexts such as on storefront signs, karaoke lyrics, and film subtitles. Three letters no longer used for Mandarin are carried over from the 1913 standard: 23 more letters were added specifically for Taiwanese Hokkien: Two tone marks were added for the additional tones: ˪, ˫

Cantonese

The following letters are used in

Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...

. If a syllable ends with a consonant other than -an or -aan, the consonant's letter is added, then followed by a final middle dot. -ㄞ is used for ːi(aai) (e.g. 敗, ㄅㄞ baai6) -ㄣ is used for �n(an) (e.g. 跟, ㄍㄣ gan1), and -ㄢ is used for ːn(aan) (e.g. 間, ㄍㄢ gaan1). Other vowels that end with -n use -ㄋ· for the final ㄋ. (e.g. 見, ㄍㄧㄋ· gin3) -ㄡ is used for �u(au). (e.g. 牛, ㄫㄡ, ngau4) To transcribe u(ou), it is written as ㄛㄨ (e.g. 路, ㄌㄛㄨ lou6) ㄫ is used for both initial ng- (as in 牛, ㄫㄡ, ngau "cow") and final -ng (as in 用, ㄧㄛㄫ·, yong "use"). ㄐ is used for ͡s(z) (e.g. 煑, ㄐㄩ zyu2) and ㄑ is used for ͡sʰ(c) (e.g. 全, ㄑㄩㄋ· cyun4). During the time when Bopomofo was proposed for Cantonese, tones were not marked.

Computer uses

Input method

Bopomofo can be used as an input method for Chinese characters. It is one of the few input methods that can be found on most modern personal computers without having to download or install any additional software. It is also one of the few input methods that can be used for inputting Chinese characters on certain

cell phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive telephone call, calls over a radio freq ...

s.. On the

QWERTY QWERTY () is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard ( ). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden ty ...

keyboard, the symbols are ordered columwise top-down (e.g. )

Unicode

Bopomofo was added to the

Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0. The Unicode block for Bopomofo is U+3100–U+312F: Additional characters were added in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. The Unicode block for these additional characters, called Bopomofo Extended, is U+31A0–U+31BF: Unicode 3.0 also added the characters and , in the Spacing Modifier Letters block. These two characters are now (since Unicode 6.0) classified as Bopomofo characters.

References

External links

The Manual of The Phonetic Symbols of Mandarin Chinese
*

reference glyphs for and
Bopomofo annotations
nbsp;– adds inline and pop-up annotations with bopomofo pronunciation and English definitions to Chinese text or web pages.
Mandarin Dictionary
nbsp;– needs Chinese font for

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character se ...

encoding
Chinese Phonetic Conversion Tool
nbsp;– converts between Pinyin, Bopomofo and other phonetic systems

nbsp;– converts between Hanyu Pinyin, Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh and other known or (un-)common Romanization systems
Bopomofo -> Wade-Giles -> Pinyin -> Word List
National Phonetic Alphabet (bopomofo) spellings of words transliterated into the International Phonetic Alphabet. The vowel values have been verified against the official IPA site. See IPA help preview, SIL International website. Se

(Accessed 23-12-2010).
Bopomofo to Pinyin converter and reversePinyin Annotator
nbsp;– adds bopomofo (bopomofo) or pinyin on top of any Chinese text, prompts alternative pronunciations to homonyms, has the option of exporting into OpenOffice Writer for further editing

nbsp;– online keyboard for bopomofo which can turn it into Chinese characters
Online Bopomofo Input Method Editor
{{Authority control Mandarin words and phrases Auxiliary and educational artificial scripts Ruby characters Writing systems derived from the Chinese Transcription of Chinese Han character input Writing systems introduced in 1913