Is there a Chinese Alphabet?

Many people are curious about Chinese alphabet because of unique looking characters they commonly see. People are also intrigue with how one character can represent a word or several words. However, if you are going to search online for a list of Chinese alphabet, you will not find any that includes all the present Chinese characters and their comprehensive meanings. This is because there is no Chinese alphabet. To understand this topic clearer let us begin with the normal creation of a writing and language system.

In the start, societies use symbols to refer to simple things. These symbols are pictures and signs referring to real objects. As an example, they would simply draw an image of a bird to refer to birds or a stick of a man figure to refer to a man. As time moves on, these societies became more complex and so are the symbols they used for referring to things. They have also devised a way to refer to abstract things like friend, pray and year. In time, these symbols began to change to make them easier to write.

As these societies continue to grow and prosper, written language, now known as the alphabet, took shape. Sound was attached to these alphabets so that when you combine them together, you could produce a word. Thus, the symbols were replaced with alphabets and were used as the main language for communication. Through the years the alphabets for each language was refined and systematized. However, the Chinese language did not follow this process.

Instead of turning into alphabet, the Chinese writing system remained using the symbols. The symbols were just modified and combined together in order to form a character. This is the main reason why there is no Chinese alphabet. Another reason is that the Chinese language is tonal. This means that there different tones in the language and each tones represent a different meaning. The Cantonese has 6 tones while the Mandarin has 4 tones. Symbols or characters with the same tones can also have different meanings and the meaning can only be distinguished through the context of sentence. This is now commonly referred to as visual puns. Therefore, there is really no systematic way of categorizing Chinese characters until the 1950s.

Pinyin was developed in the 1950s, which is an alphabet based on Latin. However, there are small differences in the alphabet like there is no letter V in this kind of alphabet. Diphthongs and vowels can also standalone with a consonant. Learning and getting used to this kind of alphabet may take some time. However, if you simply want to know the Chinese character for the English alphabet, you can easily find this information online. If you want an intensive study of the Chinese alphabet, the Internet has numerous sites specifically created to teach the Chinese writing system. From these sites, you will find other Chinese characters that are not included in the Pinyin but are currently used in China.