The Phonetic Chinese Language (PCL) Institute

 

Mission Statement

 

The PCL Institute - a non-profit, educational organization - welcomes you to join us! Together, we shall meet the challenges in teaching the Chinese language in America , and in the world including China , Taiwan , and Singapore . This revolutionary Chinese language teaching methodology is phonetic, and alphabet-based; but not akin to any pseudo-alphabetized prior schemes. It enables the Chinese language to be able to embrace an alternate alphabet-based orthography similarly employed by the other world members. Alphabetic ordering and listing for Chinese words, information processing, and retrieval are now available as basic tools.

A working alphabet is the critical key that links the phonetics of a spoken language to its writing, and acts as a primary natural language link to computers. It enables creative thoughts to be communicated through speech to the outside world. We will show precisely how the Phonetic Chinese Language (PCL) enables thoughts in Chinese to be expressed in its natural language (Cyber Chinese) , which can then be communicated to the world via computer net- works – internet. In the forthcoming semantic web (Web 3.0), PCL/Chinese, like other phonetic languages, can be automatically translated into other phonetic languages; and vice versa.

A specially designed, fully functional, tone-based, Phonetic Chinese Alphabet (PCA) has been created. When a spelling is uniquely defined for a given ideogram it is called a Tonegram , or Pinzi in Chinese, i.e. { Tonegram /Ideogram}, or { Pinzi /ideogram}, form unique pairs. Cyber Chinese is a modern, alternate orthography for ideograms. In Cyber Chinese, Chinese words, both monosyllabic (tonegrams) and polysyllabic (ideogram-compounds), are clearly defined. The Phonetic Chinese Language (PCL) provides the vital link between Cyber Chinese and their uniquely associated ideograms.

PCL Institute's mission is to help establish Cyber Chinese - an alphabet-based orthography, which is parallel to the existing Chinese ideographic characters (ideograms) - as a modern extension to the Chinese language in the 21 st century and beyond. Cyber Chinese's tonal spelling and alphabetic ordering capabilities jointly make teaching, learning, dictionary-lookup, indexing, searching, communicating, and processing in the Chinese language far faster, logical, and phonetic, as well as enabling research in PCL/Chinese computational linguistics, including automatic translation between Chinese and other phonetic languages of the world.

PCL System can accommodate a wide range of learning approaches: (1) Minimal: Cyber Chinese may be used as a phonetic-tonal sound notation for ideograms only, after which it may be discarded (as in the case of Pinyin and Juyin). But, one has gained an invaluable alphabetical access to Chinese language and computers. (2) Exclusive: One can learn from Cyber Chinese text to read and speak perfect Mandarin, and engage in all types of Chinese language activities via Cyber Chinese without learning ideograms, since Cyber Chinese is an exact parallel orthography (mirror language) to ideograms. (3) Optimal - Learn {PCL/Chinese} simultaneously as they are the voice and image of the same language.

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Brief History of Chinese Sound Transcription (Pseudo-alphabetizing)

In 1605, the Italian Jesuit missionary Mateo Ricci was the first in systematically adopting the Latin alphabet for Chinese sound transcription. From 1867-1892, using the English alphabet, Wade and Giles established a de facto standard for Chinese sound transcription for western governments and merchants, culminating in the publication of a 1415-page Chinese-English dictionary in 1892 by H.A. Giles. The US Library of Congress used Wade-Giles scheme for Chinese language indexing until 2003.

In 1920, Juyin Fuhao, an indigenous alphabet having 37 letters, was promulgated by then China 's Department of Education throughout Chinese primary schools for standard sound notation for ideograms. In 1922, the four diacritic tone marks (1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd , and 4 th tone: “ –, /, v, and \ ”) were introduced as standard tone indicators to be placed atop the vowel letter in a syllable. Juyin Fuhao has had a wide impact on the standardization for the Guoyu (the national language) pronunciation in China from 1920 to about 1950. After 1950, Taiwan continued the use of Juyin Fuhao for sound notation till today.

In 1958, after six years' research, the new China announced the adoption of Hanyu Pinyin as the standard sound notation for ideograms. Hanyu Pinyin, which is known in the West simply as Pinyin, adopted the Latin alphabet, i.e. the 26 English letters, of which the letter “ v “ is not used. The new standard pronunciation using Pinyin for transcription is called the Putonghua (the common language), which is slightly relaxed from the earlier 1920 standard, Guoyu. After 50+ years of radio and 25+ years of nationwide TV broadcasting in Putonghua, it has achieved wider acceptance in China than ever before. Guided by China 's Written Language Reform Commission (WLRC), the scope, effort, and success in unifying Chinese speech pronunciation under Putonghua is without precedence. Perhaps 90% of Chinese people can now understand Putonghua, which is referred to in the west as Mandarin. All the time, China 's WLRC continued its intensive research, and made several attempts to upgrade Pinyin to a bona fide phonetic language to replace the ideographic orthography. Unfortunately, after these dedicated efforts, Pinyin is still unable to achieve unique spelling for a single ideogram, let alone for tens of thousands of ideograms. In 1985 WLRC was renamed Language Working Commission.

In summary, during the past four centuries countless attempts were made in trying to adapt the Latin alphabet to the Chinese language by scholars from China and from many other countries. All of them were able to achieve sound notation for Mandarin; but none of them was able to reach the level of a spelling language free from homonym interference. This fact has clearly demonstrated to us that the Latin alphabet is NOT a working alphabet for the tonal-homophonic Chinese language.

Understanding Tonal-Homophonic Characteristics of Chinese Language

 

Thousands of years ago, Mandarin had settled down to a tiny sound domain having only a little more than 400 distinct monosyllabic sounds. Such a tiny sound domain, over a long period of time, inevitably produced large numbers of homophones (ideograms which have the same sound but differ in design and meaning) throughout the Chinese language. This fact alone has defeated all prior attempts in implementing a phonetic representation scheme for ideograms, including China 's Pinyin.

In order to relieve sound congestion, Chinese people sought desperately to break out from the confines of a tiny sound domain. This eventually led to the decision to subdivide each sound syllable into multiple tones. It is conceivable, that seeking finer division within sound was dictated by the monosyllabic nature of ideograms themselves, rather than seeking a polysyllabic path like most western languages did. By the eighth century, perhaps much earlier, all ideograms' pronunciation had migrated from the sound domain to the tone domain but remained strictly monosyllabic . This resulted in packing two distinct attributes (sound and tone) into a single utterance in speech - a tone syllable .

A tone syllable is produced from a pitch pattern carried by a vowel sound as it is being uttered. The challenge for a working alphabet for Mandarin is to capture both the vowel sound and the tone simultaneously in a single letter for each and every utterance in Chinese speech. Two attributes (sound and tone) replacing the usual one (sound only) for each and every syllable presents a radically new challenge in phonetic spelling.

Chinese is a tonal language without a native alphabet. Mandarin (Putonghua or Guoyu) is the recognized standard pronunciation throughout China , Taiwan , and Singapore . Written Chinese is based on thousands of ideographic characters (ideograms or logographs). All ideograms are pronounced with a monosyllabic sound carrying a specific tone. Each ideogram is a unique design having many strokes but without an alphabetic foundation. Chinese ideograms must be memorized by rote and in great numbers. Since ideograms do not offer any hint in pronunciation like spelling does, both reading and comprehension skills develop very slowly. This is the direct consequence arising from the complete disconnect between Chinese speech and writing. The purpose in creating the Phonetic Chinese Language (PCL) is to provide a link between speech and writing (a phonetic spelling orthography), and, at the same time, making sure all Tonegrams (Pinzi) achieve unique mapping to ideograms.

In English, changing a consonant or a vowel, changes the sound and the word (meaning). In Chinese, in addition to consonant and vowel, a change in tone also changes the utterance, changes the ideogram, and changes the meaning of a word. Clearly, a tone-based alphabet is needed for direct addressing the Chinese tone domain in order to achieve phonetic-tonal spelling representation of Mandarin speech. Hence, as a minimum, a three-dimensional alphabetic structure (consonant, vowel, and tone) is needed by tonal Chinese in place of the usual two-dimensional alphabetic structure (consonant and vowel). This tone-based alphabet is absolutely necessary for Mandarin; however, it is not yet sufficient .

With a tone-based alphabet, the homophone interference problem is reduced to that of the homotone (ideograms which have the same pronunciation in both sound and tone but differ in design and in meaning) interference problem. In a 10,000-ideogram ensemble, it means a reduction from the largest number, 147 homophones, for the sound [yi] to the largest number, 78 homotones, for the fourth tone [xi4]. Although there are four tones in each sound in Mandarin, the four-fold expansion from sound to tone syllables, unfortunately, yielded a reduction by a factor of two (2) only from homophone interference to homotone interference. [See Table of Mandarin Homophones and Homotones]

Such severe homotone interference demands that its solution be built into the alphabetic structure itself. Moreover, the resulting spelling must be highly readable, learnable, and all tonal spelling entries must fit perfectly within the overall alphabetic ordering scheme in both sound and tone sequences. The 4 th alphabetic dimension is manifested in the design (shapes) of the letters of PCA. PCA adopted radical-styled letters of the alphabet, which is capable of: (1) conveying the Mandarin phonetics from the letters of alphabet, and also (2) providing intelligent links between the “ icon ” of a Tonegram and the “ radical ” of its associated ideogram from the radical-styled letters of the alphabet.

An elegant way to resolve the homotone interference is to attach, at the end of a tone syllable, a silent letter called “icon“, which points at the “radical“ of its associated ideogram to achieve unique mapping. The “icons” constitute the 4 th dimension needed for intelligent homotone resolution. Thus, the two extra dimensions, tone and icon , are needed to cope with the demand of tonal-homophonic characteristics of the Chinese language. Consequently, a working alphabet for the Chinese language has to have a four-dimensional (consonant, vowel, tone and icon) alphabetic structure. Any alphabet short of these four dimensions could not be a working (functional) alphabet for the tonal-homophonic Chinese.

 

A Working Alphabet Brings Chinese Language into Modern Information Age

 

During the past three decades we have created and tested just such a working alphabet - the Phonetic Chinese Alphabet (PCA) – specifically designed for the tonal-homophonic Chinese language . Based on PCA, an alternate phonetic orthography for the ideographic Chinese characters (ideograms) has been established. Its name is the Phonetic Chinese language (PCL) , or Cyber Chinese for short.

In any ideographic text (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.), ideograms are printed in rows without a space between them. In classical (ancient) Chinese writings, each ideogram represented a word. Modern Chinese, however, is essentially polysyllabic in nature. More than 80% of modern Chinese writing consists of bisyllabic (disyllabic) words formed with 2-ideogram compounds, more than 3% consists of polysyllabic words formed with 3 or more-ideogram compounds, and less than 17% remains monosyllabic, with single-ideogram words. In fact, Chinese ideographic text does not and cannot define polysyllabic Chinese words , which can only be defined in dictionaries , or in PCL text , i.e . Cyber Chinese text. Unlike any ideographic text, Chinese words, in PCL text, are clearly defined by “spaces”. Thus, PCL is a superior orthography, and may be utilized to great advantage in any Chinese education technology, as well as in Chinese information technology (CIT), especially in search engines.

It is time for us to join together enabling the Phonetic Chinese Alphabet (PCA) to become an open standard, as a part of the International Standard Organization (ISO), for all to use and share. This will enable the Chinese language, via the Cyber Chinese text, to become a member of the alphabet-based languages of the world, and to participate in the forthcoming semantic web (Web 3.0) in various modes, forms, and in automatic multilingual communication and translation. PCL/Chinese invites you to participate in the unprecedented opportunities in Chinese language teaching/learning, Chinese information processing, Chinese natural language engineering, Chinese search engine development, computational linguistics, automatic multilingual communication, and much more.

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Next: Table of Homonyms