General Chinese

Encyclopedia : G : GE : GEN : General Chinese

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General Chinese (GC) is a phonetic system invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major Chinese dialects. It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.

GC is not specifically a romanization system, but two alternate systems: one uses Chinese characters phonetically, and the other is a romanization system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

Character-based GC

The character version of GC uses distinct characters for any traditional characters that are distinguished phonemically in any of the control varieties of Chinese, which consist of several dialects of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Hakka, and Yue. That is, a single character will only correspond to more than one traditional character when these are homonyms in all control dialects. In effect, GC is a reconstruction of the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, except that distinctions that have been lost from all major dialects are not bothered with.

Often the most common of these homonymic traditional characters is used for GC, but when that character has strong semantic connotations that would interfer with phonetic reading, Chao selected a less common character instead.

Romanized GC

Romanized GC has distinct symbols for the onsets (many of them digraphs, and a few trigraphs) and the rimes distinguished by any of the control dialects. For example, it retains the final consonants p, t, k, and the distinction between final m and n, as these are found in several modern dialects. GC also maintains the "round-sharp" distinction, such as sia vs. hia, though those are both xia in Beijing Mandarin. It also indicates the "muddy" (voiced) stops of Shanghainese.

Like Chao's other invention, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, romanized GC uses tone spelling. However, the system is somewhat different. The difference between the yin and yang tones is indicated by the voicing of the initial consonant, which is possible because the original voicing distinctions are retained.

The digraphs are not reliably featural; for example, the digraphs for the voiced stops do not all follow the same pattern. This is because Chao ran frequency tests, and used single letters for the most common consonants and vowels, while restricting digraphs and trigraphs to the more infrequent ones.

An example of GC can be illustrated with Chao's name:

Characters	趙	元	任	Notes
GC	dhyao	qiuan	remm
Mandarin (Pinyin)	zhào	yuán	rèn
Cantonese, colloquial (Yale)	chíuh	yùhn	yahm
Cantonese, literary (Yale)	jiuh	yùhn	yahm
Wu (Shanghainese)	dzau	gnioe	gnin
Japanese, go'on reading	deu	gwan	nin	post-WWII:  jō gan nin
Japanese, kan'on reading	teu	gen	zin	post-WWII:  chō gen jin
Korean	jo	won	im
Vietnamese	triệu	nguyên	nhâm

All the GC initials here are voiced: The h in dh shows that this is a "muddy" consonant, and the q in qiuan represents an initial ng- (becoming g in Japanese). This voicing shows up in the Cantonese yang tones, which are represented by aitches in Yale romanization. "Heavy" codas, such as remm, indicate the "going" (去) tone, as in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The y in dhyao indicates that the initial is a stop in Min and Japanese, but otherwise an affricate. Cantonese and Korean retain the final m of remm. These pronunciations are all predictable given the GC transcription. Both the pre-war and post-war Japanese orthographies are recoverable.

In every dialect, some different spellings will be pronounced the same. However, which ones these are will differ from dialect to dialect. There are some irregular correlations with GC. Often a particular dialect will have a pronunciation for a word that is not what you might expect, due to irregular developments in that dialect. This is especially true with the voicing of Japanese consonants, which has evolved idiosyncratically in different compound words. However, except for Japanese voicing, the system is phonetic about 90% of the time.

GC vs. traditional characters

Because GC makes many distinctions that Pinyin does not, it has many fewer homonyms to confuse the reader. Combine this with the fact that many traditional Chinese characters are restricted to specific compounds, as well as the fact that many homonymic characters distinguish meanings of what are historically the same word, and therefore understandable in context, and Chao believed that GC begins to approach the effectiveness of traditional characters in representing Chinese.

Reference

• 趙元任，通字方案。Yuen-Ren Chao, A Project for General Chinese. Beijing, 1983.

 

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