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The Chinese Alphabet |
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Sorry to break it to you - but there is no Chinese Alphabet. You've probably arrived here by searching for "chinese
alphabet" on a search engine. This page was created to put an
end to your futile search If you wanted to know the Chinese alphabet so that you could get a name translated then we can help you, but only if you do a few minutes research for yourself. First of all, visit the Translate This! forum and read the guidelines at the top of that page. There you will find links to lists of Western names transliterated into Chinese. If these do not help you then feel free to post a message asking for a Chinese name.
If you are interested in what makes the Chinese system different to an alphabetical system, then read on... Alphabets consist of symbols or letters which have no intrinsic meaning on their own. Instead, they represent particular sounds, so when placed together in a particular order, speech patterns may be duplicated on the page. Chinese, by contrast, uses pictographs or ideographs. Here, each chinese symbol represents an object, concept or idea. Single Chinese characters may represent many concepts. Take the number "1" for example. It is one of the simplest characters possible but can mean one, unit, once, alone, whole, all etc. For this reason, it is common for Chinese words to consist of two characters, in order to clarify the exact meaning. An example would be 鼠, meaning rat or mouse. By adding the character for "old" in front of it, 老鼠, the meaning is unambiguously changed to "mouse"See examples of popular Chinese symbols. For a more detailed discussion of phonetic alphabets compared with the Chinese pictographic system please see http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_alphabet.html
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