The standard sounds of Chinese characters are based on the phonetic system of the Beijing dialect.
Guanhua had no clear pronunciation standards and basically followed the traditional readings reflected in the official rhyme books (韵書, 韵书).
At the end of the 19th century, influenced by Japan's Meiji Restoration,[a] the new term Mandarin (guóyǔ, 國語, 国语, National language) replaced Guanhua, and the issue of the unification of Mandarin aroused social concern.
[3] In February 1913, the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China held a meeting of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation in Beijing.
Polyphonic characters not only increase the burden of language learning, but sometimes also cause greater trouble.
For example, according to a message from Qingdao News Network in 2002: Two years ago, Zhang borrowed 14,000 yuan from Gao.
(meaning paid back debt 4,000 yuan (when character "还" is pronounced "huán"), or still owe a debt of 4,000 yuan (when character "还" is pronounced "hái"))."
In December 1985, the National Language Commission, the Education Commission and the Ministry of Radio and Television announced the "Table of Mandarin Words with Variant Pronunciation" (普通话异读词审音表), stipulating that "from the date of publication of the standard, departments of culture, education, publishing, broadcasting and other departments across the country, when come across Mandarin words with variant pronunciations, should follow the readings of this table."
For example: "長 (长)" is pronounced cháng (meaning "long") or zhǎng (grow).
The simplified Chinese character "脏" is pronounced zāng (髒, dirty) or zàng (臟, internal organs).
[17] In dictionaries, each pronunciation of a polyphonic polysemous character is called a phonetic item (音項，音项).
Sounds that only appear in special usages are rare readings, such as “解数 (xièshù )”，“南無 (námó)”.
There are two main methods: [20] 長: used to have the meaning of measuring the length, with the sound corresponding to today's zhàng.
Homophonic characters in the broad sense means that the initials and finals are the same, but the tones can be different.
For example, “媽(mā), 麻(má), 馬(mǎ), 駡(mà)” are homophones in a broad sense.
Some have a small number of homophonic characters, such as āo (凹熬), cāo (操糙) and bǎng (榜綁膀).
Zhou Youguang (1993) introduced two solutions to homophones: [29] There are two systems for phonetic notation of Chinese characters.
In Pinyin, tones may be distinguished either by diacritics, for example “媽(mā), 麻(má), 馬(mǎ), 駡(mà)”, or by numbering the tones, for example: “媽(ma1), 麻(ma2), 馬(ma3), 駡(ma4)”.
Jyutping for Cantonese uses the numerical method, for example: hoeng1gong2 (香港, Hong Kong) Kun'yomi (訓読み) is a way of pronunciation of Chinese characters in Japanese.
For example, when Chinese character 山 (shān, mountain) was borrowed to Japan, people could read it with the Japanese name of mountain Yama (kun'yomi), or with the Chinese sound of shan (on'yomi).
Application of phonetic attributes in Chinese character input, for example, Chinese character keyboard input is supported on MS Windows by sound expressions in Pinyin or symbolic symbols.
The poem shows the popularity of homophones and the roles of tones in Chinese language.