D. Scope of the Study

A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN MANDARIN AND ENGLISH PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM

by
Raditya Adipromono
04 026 055

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

D. Scope of the Study
In phonetics, it is known about segment and suprasegmental phoneme. Segment is used primarily to refer to any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech (“segment”, 2007: par.1). It is known that sound classes in the segment are divided into two major classes, consonants and vowels. Then another class of sound is glides which is a type of sound which shows properties of both consonants and vowels.

Mandarin has two letter’s models; Hanzi (kanji) and Pinyin. Hanzi is a logogram used in Chinese’s writing. In Chinese tradition, each character corresponds to a single syllable. It has no patent alphabet like other language, or in other words, there is no ABC system; the number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history (“Hanzi”, 2006: par.2) Each letter represents one word and has one or some meaning. Besides, Pinyin is Latin symbol which symbolize Mandarin’s phone. There are many articles which describe some definition about Mandarin Pinyin as follows:

Pinyin is a Chinese system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese with 25 European characters (the letter "v" is never used). The pronunciation of most of the letters is similar to pronunciation to the European counterparts, but there are notable differences (“pinyin”, 2006: par.1)

Based on the statement above, Pinyin is almost similar to A-B-C system, but the sound of its symbols has many differences from A-B-C symbols in English. Pinyin is a Chinese alphabet symbol which represents European alphabet symbol to make Mandarin easier to be learnt. In another source, Pinyin is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin Romanization system in use. Pin means "spell" and yin means "sound". It is also known as scheme of the Chinese phonetic alphabet (“pinyin”, 2007: par.1). Pinyin uses Roman letters to represent sounds in Standard Mandarin. The way these letters represent sounds in Standard Mandarin differ from other languages that use the Roman alphabetical phone. For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by [b] and [g] correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by [p] and [k] in some Western uses of the Latin script. So that, this research only focuses on Pinyin system in order to make the research easier.

This research examines how Mandarin phones are pronounced, and also to analyze the function of suprasegmental phoneme (tone) in Mandarin. All phones in language have some suprasegmental phoneme or prosodic properties which are not related to the place or manner of articulation. These properties are pitch, loudness, and length. The researcher will describe the comparison between Mandarin and English tone, because Mandarin is a kind of tone language that can make a different meaning in a same syllable.

Next Item : E. Review on Related Studies

Previous Item :
A. Background for Choosing the Study
B. Problem Formulation
C. Objectives of the Study