PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF CHINESE SPOKEN LANGUAGES

This chapter provides the phonetic and phonological background of Chinese spoken languages, Mandarin especially. Before going into the main theme of the chapter, a brief clarification of the distinction between phonetics and phonology is provided for readers of non-linguistic background. After generally describing the major features of spoken Chinese, standard Mandarin, among other dialects, is chosen as a typical example to explore in detail the unique syllable structure of spoken Chinese. Both traditional initial-final analysis and modern linguistic analysis approaches such as phonetics, phonemics, and phonotactics are described with the goal of examining Mandarin syllables and phonemes in detail. Hopefully, this chapter can help lay the linguistic foundations of Chinese spoken language processing (CSLP) for both Chinese and non-Chinese speaking researchers and engineers.