IPA Transliteration of Chinese Romanization Systems
Warren A. Shibles
Abstract
The following attempt toward providing a standard IPA phonetic chart for Mandarin Chinese. The phonetic literature on Chinese is in a state of crisis. There are over fifty romanization systems for Chinese none of which is phonetic. Romanization-English dictionaries are, practically speaking, unavailable. One wishing to learn Chinese is left without being able to know how the words read are to be pronounced.
This paper is an attempt to remedy this problem by giving the IPA phonetics for each of the words in Mandarin. An IPA phonetic transcription is also provided for each of the major romanizations, which may also be translated into all of the others. All of the reasonably available IPA transcriptions have been given, including the actual (Realphonetik) of the author. This provides a comprehensive comparative phonetic analysis. This complete phonetic dictionary is also intended to serve as a guide for teaching, language acquisition, and research. It is to be revised and corrected for greater accuracy and expanded to include the range of acceptable pronunciations and dialects.