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General Chinese ( ''Tung-dzih'') is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously.〔Chao (1983).〕 It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published".〔Branner 2006:231. More recent diaphonemic systems, such as Ao (1991) and Norman (2006), cover a smaller number of morphemes. Norman also excludes Min, though he covers a larger number of non-Min dialects than Chao.〕 It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese. General Chinese is not specifically a romanization system, but two alternative systems: one (''Tung-dzih Xonn-dzih'') uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other (''Tung-dzih Lo-maa-dzih'') is an alphabetic romanization system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh. ==Character-based General Chinese== The character version of General Chinese uses distinct characters for any traditional characters that are distinguished phonemically in any of the control varieties of Chinese, which consist of several dialects of Mandarin, Wu, Min, Hakka, and Yue. That is, a single syllabic character will only correspond to more than one logographic character when these are homonyms in all control dialects. In effect, General Chinese is a syllabic reconstruction of the pronunciation of Middle Chinese, less distinctions which have been dropped nearly everywhere. The result is a syllabary of 2082 syllables, about 80% of which are single morphemes—that is, in 80% of cases there is no difference between GC and standard written Chinese, and in running text, that figure rises to 90–95%, as the most common morphemes tend to be uniquely identified. For example, ''kai'' can only mean 開 ''kāi'' 'open', and ''sam'' can only mean 三 ''sān'' 'three'.〔Excepting rare, obsolete, or variant characters, such as 叁, the bank variant of ''sān'' 'three'.〕 Chao notes, "These syllables then are morphemes, or words with definite meanings, or clusters of meanings related by extensions. About 20 percent of the syllables are homophones under each of which there will be more than one morpheme, (are traditionally ) usually written with different characters () The degree of homophony is so low that it will be possible to write text either in literary or colloquial Chinese with the same character for each syllable () as has been tested in texts of various styles." Chao compares General Chinese to how Chinese was written when the writing system was still productive: "This amounts to a 100 percent use of writing Chinese by 'phonetic loan' () The situation is that when the ancients wrote a character by sound regardless of meaning, it was a 'loan character', whereas if a modern schoolboy writes one, he is punished for writing the wrong character!"〔Chao 1976:107–108.〕 Taking a telegraphic code-book of about 10,000 characters as a representative list of characters in modern use,〔Since, as he put it, "most of the additional (in a large dictionary ) are simply graphical variants or quite obsolete words" (Chao 1976:115).〕 Chao notes that General Chinese results in a reduction of 80% in the number of characters needing to be learned. In the 20% of cases where a syllable corresponded to more than one word, Chao generally selected the graphically most basic traditional character for General Chinese, as long as it wasn't unduly rare. However, when that character had strong semantic connotations that would have interfered with a phonetic reading, he selected a more neutral character. This phenomenon is familiar from Chinese transcriptions of foreign names. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「General Chinese」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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