NCJ Number
134981
Journal
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin Volume: 61 Issue: 3 Dated: (March 1992) Pages: 10-15
Date Published
1992
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This article provides police officers with a basic understanding of the Chinese language and naming system, thereby helping them to report and record Chinese names more accurately.
Abstract
The article discusses Chinese characters and dialects, romanization systems, and how to determine and record Chinese proper names. Instead of an alphabet, the Chinese language is composed of thousands of characters, each of which represents one syllable. Each character is also a unit in itself and represents a complete idea. Although written characters are the same for all who use the Chinese language, the pronunciation of the characters varies among dialects and subdialects. Seventy percent of the Chinese population uses the Mandarin dialect. The phonetic representation of a Chinese character into words or syllables with the use of the Latin alphabet is called romanization. The various romanization systems for the dialects present difficulties in identifying a Chinese person, because they create different versions of spelling when converting a Chinese character into English. The best identification of a Chinese name is thus the characters themselves. Coding systems have been developed to convert Chinese characters into 4-digit numbers that can be transmitted by telegraph, teletype, or typewriter. The article concludes with explanations of the construction of Chinese names and how to determine and record Chinese names.