Category Archives: pinyin rules

Hanyu Pinyin and common nouns: the rules

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cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyI’ve just added another long section of Yin Binyong’s book on the detailed rules for Hanyu Pinyin. This part (pp. 78-138) covers common nouns (2.4 MB PDF).

I should have mentioned earlier that this book isn’t useful just for those who want to know more about Pinyin. It can also serve as an excellent work for those learning Mandarin, since it tends to group like ideas together and gives many examples of how combinations form other words.

All that, and it’s absolutely free. So go ahead and download it now.

Here are the main divisions:

  1. Introduction
  2. Simple Nouns
  3. Nouns with Prefixes
  4. Nouns with Suffixes
  5. Reduplicated Nouns
  6. Nouns of Modifier-Modified Construction
  7. Nouns of Coordinate Construction
  8. Nouns of Verb-Object and Subject-Predicate Construction
  9. Locational Nouns
  10. Nouns of Time
  11. Noun Phrases that Express a Single Concept

Hanyu Pinyin and proper nouns

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cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyThe first large section from Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography to go online is the one on proper nouns (2 MB PDF).

  1. Introduction
  2. Place Names
  3. Personal Names
    1. formal names
    2. non-formal names
    3. forms of address
  4. Transliteration of Foreign Place Names and Personal Names
  5. Other Proper Nouns
    1. names of nationalities
    2. names of religions and deities
    3. names of dynasties
    4. names of festivals and holidays
    5. names of celestial bodies
    6. names of languages
    7. titles of literary and artistic works
    8. titles of newspapers and magazines
    9. names of social units
    10. trademarks
  6. Proper Nouns in Combination with Common Nouns

Thus, these rules cover many of the applications of Pinyin that appear on signage.

I’ll post a version with OCR later (probably weeks or months rather than days). In the meanwhile, you can use the bookmarks within the PDF file to navigate the document.

further reading:

detailed rules for Hanyu Pinyin: a major addition to Pinyin.Info

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cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyFor several years I’ve had online the brief official principles for writing Hanyu Pinyin. But those go only so far. Fortunately, Yin Binyong (Yǐn Bīnyōng / 尹斌庸) (1930-2003), who was involved in work on Hanyu Pinyin from the beginning, wrote two books on the subject, producing a detailed, logical, and effective orthography for Pinyin.

The only one of those two books with English explanations as well as Mandarin, Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography (Mandarin title: Hànyǔ Pīnyīn hé Zhèngcífǎ / 汉语拼音和正词法 / 漢語拼音和正詞法), has gone out of print; and at present there are no plans to bring it back into print. Fortunately, however, I was eventually able to secure the rights to reproduce this work on Pinyin.Info. Yes, the entire book. So everybody be sure to say thank you to the generous publisher by buying Sinolingua’s books.

This book, which is nearly 600 pages long, is a mother lode of information. It would be difficult for me to overstate its importance. Over the next few months I’ll be releasing the work in sections. I had intended to delay this a little, as I have had to wait for a fancy new scanner and am still awaiting some OCR software that can handle Hanzi as well as the Roman alphabet. (This Web site is an expensive hobby!) But since Taiwan has recently adopted Hanyu Pinyin I will be releasing some material soon (without OCR, for the time being) in the hope of helping Taiwan avoid making mistakes in its implementation of an orthography for Pinyin here.

Watch this blog for updates.

spelling out whole numbers in Hanyu Pinyin

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By request, here’s the pattern.

Pay particular attention to the cases of wàn (萬 / 万) and yì (億 / 亿). When the numbers quantifying those are greater than ten, wàn and yì are written separately.

8 bā
58 wǔshíbā
658 liùbǎi wǔshíbā
5,658 wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
35,658 sānwàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
435,658 sìshísān wàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
9,435,658 jiǔbǎi sìshísān wàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
79,435,658 qīqiān jiǔbǎi sìshísān wàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
379,435,658 sānyì qīqiān jiǔbǎi sìshísān wàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā
6,379,435,658 liùshísān yì qīqiān jiǔbǎi sìshísān wàn wǔqiān liùbǎi wǔshíbā

Still higher units follow the pattern of wàn and yì.

Note: When líng (zero) is a medial, it is always written separately.

507 wǔbǎi líng qī 五百零七
40,507 sìwàn líng wǔbǎi líng qī 四萬零五百零七

apostrophes in Hanyu Pinyin

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To help answer questions raised by earlier posts, I’ve added a page to my site on apostrophes in Hanyu Pinyin. It begins with the basics.

Here’s all you really need to know about when and where to place apostrophes when writing Mandarin Chinese in Hanyu Pinyin:

Put an apostrophe before any syllable that begins with a, e, or o, unless that syllable comes at the beginning of a word or immediately follows a hyphen or other dash.

Please note there is no “if there is ambiguity” in the rule above.