The silent i

I recently wrote a short series on pinyin, starting with this previous post, and today I want to just mention one of the common exceptions, and that’s the silent letter i.

In the following words, the i sound is pretty much silent:

吃 (Chī) which means to eat 次 (Cì) which means a number of times or an order/sequence 日 (Rì) which means day 是 (Shì) which means is or yes 四 (Sì) which is the number four 字 (Zì) which means a word 只 (Zhǐ) which means only

Now there are other variants of the above sounds as well but they’re the same pinyin letters. For example: 死 (Sǐ) which means death (and it’s because it sounds a bit like the number four, that four is considered unlucky). Same for 子 (Zi) which relates to a child.

2020-03-20