Chinese Bopomofo Song 中国Bopomofo歌曲

Chinese Bopomofo Song 中国Bopomofo歌曲

Zhuyin (Chinese: 注音) or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also nicknamed Bopomofo, is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects which is nowadays most commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin.

Bopomofo is the name used by the ISO and Unicode. Zhuyin (注音) literally means phonetic notation. The original formal name of the system was 國音字母; Guóyīn Zìmǔ; 'National Language Phonetic Alphabet' and 註音字母; Zhùyīn Zìmǔ; 'Phonetic Alphabet or Annotated Phonetic Letters'. It was later renamed 注音符號; Zhùyīn Fúhào; 'phonetic symbols'. In official documents, Bopomofo is occasionally called "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I" (國語注音符號第一式), abbreviated as "MPS I" (注音一式). The system is often also called either Chu-in or the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. It seems that a romanized phonetic system was released in 1984 as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II).

The name Bopomofo comes from the first 4 letters of the system: ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ and ㄈ. This is similar to the way that the word "alphabet" is ultimately derived from the names of the first two letters of the alphabet (alpha and beta), the name "Bopomofo" is derived from the first four syllables in the conventional ordering of available syllables in Mandarin Chinese. The 4 Bopomofo characters (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) that correspond to these syllables are usually placed first in a list of these characters. The same sequence is sometimes certainly used by other speakers of Chinese to refer to other phonetic systems.