PinYin and BoPoMoFo ZhuYin Equivalence


There is a straight one-to-one correspondence between ZhuYin (BoPoMoFo) and PinYin (Chinese Romanization), with the few exceptions listed at the end of the next table. Despite the usually emotionally charged arguments (usually by those who do not bother to take the time to understand the differences across the Taiwan Strait), it is just a matter of choice of symbols to represent the many sounds in Chinese. In the following table, BoPoMoFo are coded in Big5 (because BoPoMoFo is not used in mainland China; thus, the corresponding GB coding does not contain these symbols). The table below lists the 37 BoPoMoFo phonetic symbols, along with the corresponding romanized equivalents. The first half are the consonants and the second half are the vowels. Note that £¸, £¹, and £º can be both, and the corresponding PinYin are different.

Consonants
£t b£u p£v m£w f
£x d£y t£z n£{ l
£| g£} k£~ h
£¡ j£¢ q££ x
£¤ zh£¥ ch£¦ sh£§ r
£¨ z£© c£ª s
£¸ y£¹ w£º yu
Vowels
£¸ i£¹ u£º u, u:
£« a£¬ o£­ e£® e, e^
£¯ ai£° ei£± au£² ou
£³ an£´ en£µ ang£¶ eng
£· er, r

Exceptions for some vowels (but not consonants):

One more exception to the rule for ZhuYin symbols that can stand alone: The above are all the rules and exceptions to the rules. Period. Lastly, we indicate the tone by appending 1, 2, 3, 4, or 0 (e.g., wang2 nan2 xin1, which is my name).

The following table contains a complete set of all valid sounds in Mandarin, and BoPoMoFo, pinyin, etc. are the different ways of expressing the various sounds. The Big5 and GB characters in the table are only representative characters with that pronunciation. Many Chinese characters share an identical pronunciation. Conversely, there are sometimes multiple pronunciations for the same character. Note that many combinations of the consonants and vowels (e.g., "bui") are missing in Mandarin Chinese, unless you speak with a very strange accent or unless you are imitating the sounds of animals. One single font will not display the next table correctly; you need to switch fonts to view this page in Big5, GB (present setting), and HZ codes (which you accomplish, for example, in Internet Explorer through the menu |View|Encoding|.

Big5GBHZZhuYinPinYinWadeYale
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»ê°¹~{09~}£µ Ang Ang Ang
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ž±î~{1n~}£t£¸£®Bie Pieh Bye
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Additional Points

The above table deals with the phonetic symbols employed to represent the Chinese pronunciation of a character. This is analogous to the many different schemes used in English dictionaries to represent pronunciation (long vowels, short consonants, etc). As we can see from the above table, there are many methods (and many more are not listed above). The most common ones are pinyin (China) and BoPoMoFo (Taiwan). The purpose of this web page is to demonstrate the nearly one-to-one correspondence between these two methods. Personally, I prefer the pinyin method, because I already know my alphabets. Why waste time learning another set of phonetic symbols, especially when they are so nearly equivalent?

Big5 vs. GB Because of the political division of China, there are two major coding schemes: Big5 (mainly in Taiwan) and GB (mainly in mainland China). Do not confuse Big5/GB with the BoPoMoFo/pinyin phonetic representation. The coding scheme is simply a way to represent a character with a number, much like how we represent an alphabet with a number with the ASCII scheme, e.g., 65 for the letter "A". Both coding schemes are based on 4 bytes ( 32 bits) per character. For example, the character of my last name is represented with different numerical values in different coding schemes: Big5, GB (and, for that matter, Japanese, or Korean).

Big5|GB vs. Unicode|HZ To make the matter worse, there exist many coding schemes other than just Big5 and GB. At one time, every Chinese software company seemed to advocate its own proprietary coding scheme. Another fairly common coding scheme, although not as popular as Big5 or GB, is HZ. Then there is Unicode, which is used to express characters/letters of not just Chinese Mandarin, but all sorts of languages, Asian and European alike; thus, the Unicode coding system contains Chinese characters along with many non-Chinsese characters.

Traditional vs. Simplified Style. A completely separate idea (not to be confused with phonetic representation or coding schemes) is the traditional style (which has more strokes for certain characters, favored in Taiwan) versus the simplified style (favored in China). The styles are analogous to different fonts in the US, much like how my wingdings font and my courier font display two different symbols for the same alphabet "A".

Input Method. Another yet completely different concept is the input method. Because the English-based keyboard is what we normally see in the US, we need to adopt that to Chinese. There are many input methods for picking out a specific Chinese character -- I am aware of at least 15 such methods. One of these is pinyin, where you simply type in the alphabet (which I think is the simplest because I am comfortable with typing English with a US keyboard). For example, I would type "w" "a" "n" "g"; about 15 characters pop up on my screen; and I pick out the character that corresponds to my last name. The BoPoMoFo method is similar in that each key maps into a phonetic symbol. There are many mappings for BoPoMoFo, one such mapping is shown here. There are sufficient number of keys on a US keyboard for each of the 37 BoPoMoFo phonetic symbols. Other input methods are based on pronunciation in other dialects (such as Cantonese, rather than Mandarin), radicals (bu4shou3), number of strokes, the type of strokes at four corners of the character (si4jiao3hao4ma3), the shape of the character (cang1jie2), ..., even English equivalent. For example, my last name translates to "king" in English; thus, when I employ the last input method, I type "king" on my US keyboard; a number of Chinese characters or phrases that correspond to "king" in meaning pop up on my screen; and I choose the correct one. As for me -- well, I hardly ever type in Chinese -- but when I do, I do most of my input with pinyin. Without exception, everyone I know who masters both BoPoMoFo and pinyin prefers pinyin, just like myself. I occasionally switch to other methods, when I, for example, do not know the pronunciation of the character that I am trying to type.

Directionality. Western languages are written in horizontal lines left-to-right. However, certain languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) are written in horizontal lines right-to-left. Chinese languages (and those with a strong Chinese influence such as Japanese and Korean) are traditionally written in vertical lines (top-to-bottom) arranged right-to-left. However, this tradition is not commonly practiced today. China has long changed the directionality to be in line with the Western practice (i.e., horizontal lines left-to-right). However, many Taiwanese publications seem to follow no rules. It is typical to see top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and left-to-right conventions all coexist on the same page in a newspaper. This can cause serious confusions, especially when the phrases are sufficiently short such that both directions make perfect sense, but convey completely different meanings. For example, with my name read in an opposite direction, I become another equally plausible person: a new Southern King, which of course I am not.

There are many permutations of the above concepts. To make the matter worse, there are people who mix already messy Chinese schemes with other languages that also employ Chinese characters (such as Japanese and Korean). Such is the sad state of things when a country that should be united remains divided, and ordinary folks like I pay for the resulting chaos. I wrote this web page in an attempt to reduce such misunderstandings.


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PinYin and BoPoMoFo ZhuYin Equivalence

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Nam Sun Wang
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Maryland
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e-mail: nsw@eng.umd.edu ©1999 by Nam Sun Wang
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