There is no Chinese alphabet in the sense we
understand it in the Westerner languages. In the Westerner culture the
word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet:
alpha and beta. Each of the letters of our alphabet represents a sound
that generally has no particular meaning. Chinese characters are not
letters. Although there are a lot of exceptions, Chinese characters
represent a concept, an idea or an object.
The syllable is what gets closer to our conception of the alphabet we
use for spelling words in the Westerner languages. So for the modern
Chinese there is a set of about 400 syllables. These syllables are
made of two elements: an initial, the sheng
and a final the yun
. The first part, the
sheng is the consonant that begins syllable. The sheng is followed by
a yun that is generally a vowel. There is the simple yun which counts
only a single vowel like " a, e, o " and the compound yun like " ao
and an "as examples. By analogy one can spell a syllable that
corresponds to a character in the same way as a word in English is
spelt. To do this we have to know the 21 sheng and the 38 yun. But we
must remember that a character is not always equivalent to a word. A
word is most of the time made of several characters in the same way as
words in English count generally several syllables. Obviously we know
also that there are in both cases words of a single syllable.
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