2253: Intro to Pinyin Feb 14, 2021

Pinyin is the official system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese using Latin letters, designed in the 1950's. The goal was to make the language easier to teach to those unfamiliar with the language at the beginning stages. That said, as with any writing system the sounds represented will not be exactly the same. In European languages this is of course still true such as the English Z [z] compared to the German Z [ts], but Pinyin established relations between letters that are otherwise related traditionally, like

J [tɕ], Q [tɕʰ], and X [ɕ] or alternatively

Z [ts], C [tsʰ] (granted Z and C these are commonly related in Slavic languages). Overall, the way the spelling is approximated does not take from any single European language, but picks certain ones out individually.

aside from those sounds usually more distant to the Western ear, the system does allow for a general approximation of Chinese pronunciation, especially with vowels.