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<Paper uid="C82-1060">
  <Title>COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF MANDARIN SOUNDS WITH REFERENCE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> English is widely used throughout the world while Mandarin is spoken in China by one quarter of the world's population. It is interesting to compare the phonetic properties of these two languages and to study their similarities and differences to understand the problems involved when the speakers of one language learn to speak the other language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The linguistic aspects of written English and Chinese, such as those presented below, have already been studied extensively (see Suen (1979 a &amp; b)), e.g. a) the frequency of occurrence of words/ characters, b) the statistical distribution of letters/radicals, and their combinations, c) the study of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and related areas, and d) translation of one language into another. Also the linguistics aspects of spoken English have been described in well-known literature (Dewey (1923), Carterette et al (1974)), e.g. a) the frequency of occurrence of syllables, b) the statistical distribution of phonemes and their combination s , c) the phonetic system and symbolic representation of sounds, and d) acoustical analysis, recognition and synthesis of the spoken language. Such investigations, however, have been rarely conducte~'&amp;quot;on Mandarin, the official language spoken in China, owing to many reasons. In order to close this gap, the author has initiated several research projects aimed specifically at the analysis of these aspects (Suen</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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