Chinese Alphabet From A To Z Description from buzai232's blog

Chinese Alphabet From A To Z Description

The Chinese Alphabet, known as “Pinyin,” is the standard phonetic alphabet used in China. Pinyin uses all of the same Latin letters as the English alphabet except instead of “v” it uses “ ü.” A word of caution though - not every letter in Pinyin is pronounced the same way as the equivalent letter in the English alphabet! The chart above shows the initial and final sound combinations used in Pinyin. To get more news about china alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.
Chinese characters have existed for thousands of years. The earliest characters, or pictograms, often looked very similar to the items they represented. These characters eventually morphed into the less-pictographic logograms used today which often consist of phono-semantic compounds
Pinyin, on the other hand, is a fairly recent development. China adopted the current form of Pinyin in 1958. Foreigners, however, began developing their own forms of phonetic alphabets for Chinese as early as the turn of the 17th century.

The earliest known phonic alphabet was developed in the early 1600’s by a French missionary named Nicolas Trigault. He understood the Chinese language very well and in 1926 included his version of “Pinyin” in his book “Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati”
The Chinese government enlisted the help of various Chinese linguists in the 1950s to develop a more sophisticated phonic alphabet. The first version of this alphabet, which is now known as Pinyin, was published in 1958. It has been revised several times and is now used throughout schools in China as a tool to help students learn characters. It is also used in most other countries for the same reason.

How many Chinese characters and alphabet letters are there?

Chinese characters and the Pinyin alphabet are two separate and distinctive writing systems. There are over 50,000 Chinese characters in use and 26 letters in the Pinyin alphabet. These letters are used to create the 23 initial and 24 final sounds shown above.

What Is The Logic Of Chinese Characters?

While it may seem like all chinese characters are simply pictographs (characters derived from pictures), there are actually many types of characters - the least common of which is pictographs.

1. Pictographs ( xiàng xíng)

There are relatively few characters in use today which are considered pictographs. These are typically among the oldest Chinese characters still in use. The chart below shows some of the most common pictographic characters used today and how they have changed over time.
2. Determinative-Phonetic Characters (, xíngshēng)

These characters consist of two parts. One represents the sound, while the other indicates its meaning. Consider the following examples which all include the phonetic component 青 (qīng).
3. Ideographs (, zhǐ shì)

These are characters that express more abstract ideas with symbolic pictographs.These are a few common examples:
4. Combined Ideographs ( huìyì)

These are characters which consist of multiple pictographs or ideographs whose combined meaning alludes to the meaning of the new character. Here is a common example :
5. Transfer Characters (zhuǎnzhù)

These are characters which have the same meaning now due to sharing the same radical, having similar etymology, or a semantic drift. For example, the words 爸 (bà) and 父 (fù) share the 父 (fù) radical and both mean “father.” Another example are the words (kǎo) and (lǎo) which both mean “old.” These two characters were once the same character and together meant “elderly person.” They have since been separated and are both individually used to mean “old”.