The standard system of transcription for Chinese characters in this book is Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), as represented in pinyin (the official romanization of the People’s Republic of China). This is purely a convention of modern scholarship and does not at all reflect the pronunciation of Sinitic during the late Warring States period when this text was compiled. Transcribing Chinese characters into Cantonese or Taiwanese would actually be preferable, in the sense of sounding more like ancient Sinitic, since—of all modern Chinese languages and topolects—MSM has diverged the furthest from ancient and medieval pronunciations. Unfortunately, the field has not yet reached that stage.
VOWELS
In MSM vowels are generally long, as in many continental (European) languages; thus:
a is pronounced as in “father,” not as in “matter”
i is pronounced as the “ee” of “beet” or “peek,” but after z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, and r (for which, see below) it is pronounced like the “i” of “bit”
u is pronounced as the “oo” of “boo!” except after q and x, when it is pronounced like ü (see below)
e and o are a bit more difficult to grasp, with e sounding somewhat like the “u” of “lucky” and o sounding roughly like the “o” of “more”
ü sounds like the same umlauted letter in German, comparable to “you”
DIPHTHONGS
ao sounds like “ow!”
iu sounds like “yo!”
ai sounds like “eye”
ei sounds like the letter “a”
ou sounds like the letter “o”
uo or wo sounds like the combination of pinyin w and o
CONSONANTS
Most of the consonants in pinyinized MSM sound more or less like their counterparts in English, with the following exceptions:
c sounds like the “ts” of “tsetse fly”; thus “Cao Cao” is pronounced not as “cow cow,” but as “Ts’ao Ts’ao,” with noticeable aspiration
j sounds like the “g” of “gee”
x sounds like the “sh” of “she”
q sounds like the “ch” of “cheese”
z sounds like the “dz” of “adze”
ch sounds like the “ch” of “chintz” or “change”
sh sounds like the “sh” or “shin” or “shame”
zh sounds like the “g” of “gip / gyp” or the “j” of “jam”
r has a slight buzzing aspect to it, as though one were trying to pronounce “r” and “zz” (lightly) at the same time
TONES
Sinitic languages are tonal, and MSM is no different, having four tones plus a neutral tone (i.e., the absence of the other four tones). It is too much to ask noninitiates to cope with the tones when they already have so much to do in dealing with the vowels and consonants, some of which are quite counterintuitive for speakers of English. However, without the tones, homonyms sometimes occur. In order to differentiate them, I have marked the vowels of the relevant syllables with tonal diacritics when they are otherwise identical (e.g., jī and jì, qí and qì).
EXAMPLE
Following these rules, when we pronounce the title of this work, Sun Zi sounds like “Soon Dz,” bing sounds like a kind of luscious dark cherry, and fa sounds like a note to follow do, re, mi: Soon Dz bingfa.