General Chinese - Romanized General Chinese

Romanized General Chinese

Romanized General Chinese 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, such as Cantonese. General Chinese 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. Indeed, Chao characterized GC as having "the initial consonants of the Wu dialects, the vowels of Mandarin, and the endings of Cantonese. It can, however, be pronounced in any dialect, and it is meant to be, by a relatively short list of rules of pronunciation."

Like Chao's other invention, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, romanized General Chinese 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. Given that some tones are indicated by changing rather than adding letters, writing tone requires on average only one additional letter for every three syllables of text.

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. Overall, syllables in the texts he transliterated averaged under 3½ letters apiece.

An example of Romanized General Chinese can be illustrated with Chao's name:

All the General Chinese 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 "departing" (去) tone, as in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Similarly, the spelling ao in dhyao indicates the "rising" (上) tone, but because of the voiced initial, it merges with "departing" in Mandarin and literary Cantonese (though not in colloquial Cantonese). The y in dhyao indicates that the initial is a stop in Min, Japanese, and Vietnamese, but otherwise an affricate. Cantonese and Korean retain the final m of remm. These pronunciations are all predictable given the General Chinese transcription, though it was not designed with the Sinopheric languages specifically in mind. Both the pre-war and post-war Japanese orthographies are recoverable.

In every control dialect, some syllables with different spellings will be pronounced the same. However, which these are differs from dialect to dialect. There are some irregular correlations: Often a particular variety will have a pronunciation for a syllable that is not what one would expect from other syllables with similar spellings, due to irregular developments in that variety. 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.