Expert: Terry Thatcher Waltz - 4/17/2010

Question
Just a quick question.  What's the Mandarin phoneme with the most number of associated characters?

Thanks.

Answer
There isn't one.

A phoneme is an individual unit of sound in a language that functions to differentiate meaning (in English, for example, /b/ and /p/ are phonemes because "bat" and "pat" are different words (spelling has nothing to do with it, of course -- it's the sound that counts).

There are no characters associated with individual phonemes. (Well, there are, but I don't think that's what you're asking, really.) Character pronunciations are syllables, not phonemes. There are syllables that are single phonemes (a, e, etc.) but I think what you mean is a syllable.

It's funny that this is no longer an easy question to answer. Back in the day, with hard-copy printed dictionaries, you'd just flip to the phonetic index and see which syllable had the most entries. Now, with everything online and no indices needed most of the time, it's more difficult.

According to www.isca-speech.org/archive_open/archive_papers/iscslp2000/.../009.pdf, the most common monosyllable in Mandarin in terms of the number of characters associated with it is "yi". This also jives with memory from the "good old days" with paper dictionaries.