The base letters represent the initial and rime; these are modified with diacritics for the medial and tone.
This design exploits restrictions on co-occurrence of initials and medials to fit all the allowable combinations in a single cell.
At least one letter in each place of articulation comes from international use (⠖ f, ⠞ ti, ⠇ l, ⠅ k, ⠓ xi, ⠉ zh), with at least some of the others derived from these (cf.
Within a word, hyphenate erhua (⠔⠤) to avoid confusion with an initial r- in the following syllable.
Combinations of onset and rime follow the conventions of zhuyin, and are therefore not obvious from pinyin transcription.
(Words ending in ⠔⠃ rì (日) 'day' are an exception, to prevent confusion with the erhua suffix.)
Some common homophones are distinguished by prefixing with a dot 4 ⠈ or 5 ⠐, or by dropping the rime: The three grammatical uses of non-tonic de are irregular: Often printed Chinese can be contracted, compared to speech, as unambiguous where a phonetic rendition such as braille would be ambiguous; in such cases, the sign ⟨⠘⟩ may be used to indicate the omitted syllables.
[clarification needed] For example, in print the meaning of is clear, but in a phonetic script 猿 yuán 'monkey' and 啼 tí 'cry' can be obscure.