An Investigation of Mardarin Pronunciation for Speaking and Reading Purposes

Author: Hsiao-yu Chang

Abstract：

One of the objectives for the establishment of the Mandarin Promotion Committee of the Ministry of Education is to standardize the pronunciation of Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations. Characters with more than one pronunciation can be divided into three cate-gories: (1) characters with a standard pronunciation and a different but generally used pronun-ciation, (2) characters with different pronunciations for speaking and reading purposes, and (3) characters with the same form carrying different meanings according to different pronuncia-tions.
Exactly 4,808 characters were drawn from "The Commonly Used Standard Chinese Word List" and another 6,341 characters from "The Less Commonly Used Standard Chinese Word List". Characters of all these three categories were included. Examples of their pronunciation were taken out from fourteen reference books, such as Mandarin Dictionary, Chinese Diction-ary, and The Origin of Chinese Characters.
This article only presents a preliminary finding which discusses the 119 characters with pronunciation for speaking and reading purposes.

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