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Diaphonemic transcription of Chinese

General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". 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.

The character version of General Chinese (General Chinese Characters, GCC, 通字汉字) 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 correspond to more than one logographic character only 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 'open', and sam can only mean 三 '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, [which 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!" Taking a telegraphic code book of about 10,000 characters as a representative list of characters in modern use, 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.

Character GC has a separate character for each syllable. However, romanized GC has distinct onsets and rhymes. The onsets are as follows:

The voiced obstruents (the 濁 "muddy" column) are only distinct in Wu dialects. In Min, they are collapsed with the consonants of the tenuis column. Elsewhere they are generally collapsed with the aspirated column in the even tone, and with the tenuis column in other tones. An exception is Cantonese, where in the rising tone they are aspirated in colloquial speech, but tenuis in reading pronunciations. The sonorants do not vary much apart from , , which in Wu are nasals colloquially but fricatives when read. Velars , , are palatalized to affricates before , (the high front vowels ) apart from Min and Yue, where they remain stops before all vowels; , also palatalize, but remain fricatives. For instance in Mandarin, they are g, k, h before non palatalizing vowels and j, q, x before palatalizing vowels, whereas in Cantonese they remain g, k, h everywhere. (Compare the alternate spellings of Beijing and Peking; see ) The alveolar sibilants , , , , (Mandarin z, c, s) are also generally palatalized before , (to Mandarin j, q, x), collapsing with the palatalized velars , , , , in dialects which have lost the "round sharp" distinction so important to Peking opera. The palatal stops , , remain stops only in Min among the Chinese topolects (though also in Japanese and Vietnamese loan words); elsewhere they are conflated with the affricates. The palatal and retroflex sibilants are generally conflated; in Yue and Min, as well as in much of Wu and Mandarin, they are further conflated with the alveolar sibilants. This contrast remains in Beijing, where 'three' is distinct from 'mountain'; both are in Sichuanese and Taiwanese Mandarin. There are numerous more sporadic correlations. For instance, the alveolar affricates , , become stops in Taishan Yue, whereas the alveolar stops are debuccalized to , as in Hoisaan for Cantonese Toisaan (Taishan). In Yüchi, Yunnan, it is the velars , , which are debuccalized, to In the Min dialects, , become or In Xi'an Mandarin, the fricatives , , , are rounded to before rounded vowels, as in 'water' (Beijing shuǐ ).

The medial is used for syllables which have a palatalizing medial in Mandarin, but no medial in Yue. That is, in Mandarin should be read as , with the same effect on consonants as has, whereas in Cantonese it is silent. In Shanghainese both situations occur: is equivalent to in reading pronunciations, as or , but is not found in colloquial speech. In Cantonese, medial can be ignored after sibilants, as palatalization has been lost in these series. That is, siao, shao are read the same.

The most salient dialectal difference in rimes is perhaps the lack of the obstruent codas , , in most dialects of Mandarin and independently in the Wencheng dialect of Oujiang, though this has traditionally been seen as a loss of tone (see below). In Wu, Min (generally), New Xiang (Hunanese), Jin, and in the Lower Yangtze and Minjiang dialects of Mandarin, these codas conflate to glottal stop In others, such as Gan, they are reduced to , while Yue dialects, Hakka, and Old Xiang maintain the original system. Nasal codas are also reduced in many dialects. Mandarin and Wu do not distinguish between and , with them being reduced to or nasal vowels, or in some cases dropped altogether. In Shanghainese many instances of have conflated as well, or been dropped, but a phonemic distinction is maintained. In Mandarin, an additional coda is found, er , from GC
In Cantonese, the simple vowels i u iu o a e are , apart from and after velars, which open to diphthongs, as in ci and ciu Diphthongs may vary markedly depending on initial and medial, as in cau , ceau , ciau , though both ceu ~ cieu are , following the general pattern of before a coda (cf. cen vs can ). Cantonese does not have medials, apart from gw, kw, though sometimes it is the nuclear vowel which drops: giung , xiong , but giuan .