{"id":4435,"date":"2011-09-08T18:03:34","date_gmt":"2011-09-08T10:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=4435"},"modified":"2016-12-03T18:10:10","modified_gmt":"2016-12-03T10:10:10","slug":"pinyin-pangram-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2011\/pinyin-pangram-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"Pinyin pangram challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many things I plan to do eventually is to put up some graphics of how Pinyin looks in various font faces. A Pinyin pangram<\/a> would do nicely for a sample text. You know: a short Mandarin sentence in Hanyu Pinyin that uses all of the following 26 letters: abcdefghijklmnopqrstu\u00fcwxyz (i.e., the English alphabet’s a-z, minus v but plus \u00fc). <\/p>\n

But then I couldn’t find one. So I put the question out to some people I know and quickly got back two Pinyin pangrams. <\/p>\n

Ruanwo bushi yingzuo; putongfan bushi xican; maibuqi l\u00fcde kan jusede. (57 letters)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

Zuotian wo bang wo de pengyou L\u00fc Xisheng qu chengli mai yi wan doufuru he ban zhi kaoji. (70 letters)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

from Robert Sanders and Cynthia Ning, respectively. <\/p>\n

James Dew weighed in with some helpful advice. And, with some additional help from the original two contributors and my wife, I made some additional modifications, eventually resulting in a variant reduced to 48 letters: <\/p>\n

Zuotian wo bang n\u00fc\u2019er qu yi jia chaoshi mai kele, xifan, doupi.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With tone marks, that’s “Zuótiān wǒ bāng nǚ’ér qù yī jiā chāoshì mǎi kělè, xīfàn, dòupí.”<\/p>\n

I suppose xīfàn is not really the sort of thing one buys at a chāoshì. On the other hand, people probably don’t worry much about whether jackdaws really do love someone’s big sphinx of quartz, so I think we’re OK. Still, something shorter than 48 letters should be possible — though pangram-friendly brevity is more easily accomplished in English than in Mandarin as spelled in Hanyu Pinyin. As one correspondent noted:<\/p>\n

Most of the “excess” letters are vowels. Trouble is that Chinese doesn’t pile up the consonants much. Brown<\/em>, for example, takes care of b<\/em>, r<\/em>, w<\/em>, and n<\/em>, while only expending one little o<\/em>…. There’s no word like string<\/em> in Chinese (5 consonants; one vowel). Chinese piles up vowels: zuotian<\/em> and chaoshi<\/em> and doufu<\/em> and kaoji<\/em> all use more vowels than consonants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m challenging readers to come up with more Pinyin pangrams. <\/strong><\/p>\n

But I don’t want this to be a reversed shi shi shi<\/em> stunt<\/a>, so let’s stay away from Literary Sinitic. And I’d prefer the equivalent of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog<\/a>” to that of “Cwm fjord veg balks nth pyx quiz.” In other words, wherever possible this should be in real-world, sayable Mandarin.<\/p>\n

One possible variant on this would be to use “abcdefghijklmnopqrstu\u00fcwxyz” plus<\/em> all the forms with diacritics āáǎàēéěèīíǐìōóǒòūúǔùǘǚǜ.” (No ǖ — first-tone ü, that is — is necessary.) But that would be even more work. <\/p>\n

Those who devise good pangrams will will be covered in róngyào<\/a> — or something like that. <\/p>\n

Happy hunting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many things I plan to do eventually is to put up some graphics of how Pinyin looks in various font faces. A Pinyin pangram would do nicely for a sample text. You know: a short Mandarin sentence … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,12,106,28,95,32,20,19],"tags":[739],"class_list":["post-4435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-chinese","category-hanyu","category-languages","category-linguistics","category-mandarin","category-pinyin","category-romanization","tag-pangram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4435"}],"version-history":[{"count":46,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7317,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions\/7317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}