The 行 in 银行 and 行

[Shadowdh]

Hi there all... I have noticed this a couple of times but when one character is coupled with another why in some cases does the sound change eg 银行 yinhang and 行 xing... its also evident in daifu (da) and one other thats completely slipped my mind... thats what studying does for you...

[Quest]

行 has three meanings, and each has a different pronunciation: hang2 银行, xing2 行人, heng2 道行。

大夫, I believe is a relic of the older pronunciation of 大 -> dai. Mandarin dropped the "i" sound later.

[adrianlondon]

Yeah, I think it's that simple - some characters have more than one meaning (and hence potentially more than one "sound").

[ala]

Min and Wu dialects and Japanese typically have 2 readings for nearly every character.

Mandarin has only a few characters with this phenomenon.

[xiaocai]

They are different things.

[zhwj]

Mandarin has only a few characters with this phenomenon.

Depends on what you mean by "a few." Of the 3500 most commonly used characters, 450 have multiple pronunciations. 辞海 indexes over 20,000 characters, and apparently 4000-5000 of these have multiple readings. Many of these have a single pronunciation in other Chinese dialects; 多音字 in other dialects may correspond to a single Mandarin syllable.

[Shadowdh]

Thanks for the replies peeps... its good to know I wasnt not understanding it then... one more thing on the list of things to remember...