Romanization of Chinese - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The romanization of Mandarin Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

to write Chinese. Because Chinese is a tonal language with a logographic script, its characters

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

do not represent phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s directly. There have been many systems of romanization

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...

throughout history. Linguist Daniel Kane

Daniel Kane (linguist)

Daniel Kane is an Australian linguist, one of the world's foremost authorities on the extinct Jurchen and Khitan languages and their scripts.-Biography:...

recalls, "It used to be said that sinologists

Sinology

Sinology in general use is the study of China and things related to China, but, especially in the American academic context, refers more strictly to the study of classical language and literature, and the philological approach...

had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys." However, Hanyu Pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

has become the international standard since 1982. Other well-known systems include Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles

Wade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century , and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles was the most...

and Yale Romanization

Yale Romanization

The Yale romanizations are four systems created at Yale University for romanizing the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese...

.

There are many uses for Chinese romanization systems. They serve as a useful tool for foreign learners of Chinese by indicating the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters. It can also be helpful for clarifying pronunciation—Mandarin pronunciation is an issue for some speakers of other mutually unintelligible Chinese languages who do not speak Mandarin fluently. Standard keyboards such as QWERTY

QWERTY

QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...

are designed for the Latin alphabet, often making the input of Chinese characters into computers

Chinese input methods for computers

Hundreds of Chinese input methods are available for entry of Chinese characters into computers, but most keyboard-based methods rely on either pinyin phonetic readings or root shapes in Chinese characters...

difficult. Chinese dictionaries have complex sorting rules for characters, and romanization systems can simplify the problem by listing the characters by their Latin form alphabetically. In his controversial book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is a book written by John DeFrancis, published in 1984 by University of Hawaii Press. The book describes some of the concepts underlying the Chinese language and writing system, and gives the author's position on a number of ideas about the language.-Main...

, John DeFrancis

John DeFrancis

John DeFrancis was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa....

famously revealed Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

's belief that pinyin would eventually replace Chinese character

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

s, but this has not come to fruition.

Background

The Indian Sanskrit grammarians who came to China two thousand years ago to work on the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and the transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

of Buddhist terms into Chinese, discovered the "initial sound", "final sound", and "suprasegmental tone” structure of spoken Chinese syllables. This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie

Fanqiè

In Chinese phonology, fanqie is a method to indicate the pronunciation of a character by using two other characters.-The Origin:...

system, and it is the core principle of all modern systems. While the Fanqie system was ideal for indicating the conventional pronunciation of single, isolated characters in written Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...

literature, it was unworkable for the pronunciation of essentially polysyllabic, colloquial spoken Chinese languages, such as Mandarin.

Aside from syllable structure, it is also necessary to indicate tones in Chinese romanization. Tones distinguish the definition of all morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

s in Chinese, and the definition of a word is often ambiguous in the absence of tones. Certain systems such as Wade-Giles indicate tone with a number following the syllable, i.e. ma¹, ma², ma³, etc. Others, like Pinyin, indicate the tone with diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s, such as mā, má, mǎ, and the like. Still, the system of Gwoyeu Romatzyh bypasses the issue of introducing non-letter symbols by changing the letters within the syllable, as in mha, ma, maa, mah, each of which contains the same vowel, but a different tone.

Non-Chinese

Making the actual pronunciation conventions of spoken Chinese intelligible to non-Chinese-speaking students, especially those with no experience of a tonal language.
Making the syntactic
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

structure of a Chinese language intelligible to those only familiar with Latin grammar.
Transcribing the citation pronunciation of specific Chinese character
Chinese character classification
All Chinese characters are logograms, but there are several derivative types. These include a handful which derive from pictograms and a number which are ideographic in origin, but the vast majority originated as phono-semantic compounds . In older literature, Chinese characters in general may be...

s according to the pronunciation conventions of a specific European language, to allow the insertion of that Chinese pronunciation into a Western text.
Allowing instant communication in "colloquial Chinese" between Chinese and non-Chinese speakers via a phrase-book.

Chinese

Identifying the specific pronunciation of a character within a specific context (e.g. 行: xíng (to walk; behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store)). Such a system has to work vertically down the page, right-to-left, and left-to-right.
Reciting a Chinese text in Mandarin for some literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible Chinese language, such as Cantonese, who do not speak Mandarin fluently.
Learning Classical or Modern Chinese by native Mandarin speakers.
Use with a standard QWERTY keyboard.
Replacing Chinese characters to bring functional literacy to illiterate native Mandarin speakers.
Book indexing, dictionary entry sorting, and cataloguing in general.
Teaching spoken and written Chinese to foreigners.

Non-Chinese systems

The Wade, Wade-Giles, and Postal systems still appear in the European literature, but generally only within a passage cited from an earlier work. Most European language texts now use the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system (usually without tone marks) as adopted by the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

in 1979.

Missionary systems

Early Roman Catholic missionaries from Europe used Latin as their international language, and the Latinized names of some famous early Chinese thinkers are used today. For instance, "Confucius

Confucius

Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....

" can be analyzed into four parts, "con" (a regional version of the sound of the Chinese family name Kong), "fu" (same as in other common romanization systems), "ci" ("tzu" in Wade-Giles, "dz" in Yale, and "zi" in pinyin), and "us" which was added to give the name the common Latin grammatical form for a masculine noun. The "fuci" part of the name means "grand master," so the whole thing represents the appellation "Grand Master Kong." Similarly, the second most important Confucian is named "Mencius

Mencius

Mencius was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.-Life:Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng , Shandong province, only thirty kilometres ...

" in the English of today. It consists of "meng" (a common Chinese surname), "ci" ("tzu" or "zi", and meaning "master"), and the male ending. So his Latin name means "Master Meng."

The first consistent system for transcribing Chinese words in Latin alphabet is thought to have been designed in 1583-88 by Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci, SJ was an Italian Jesuit priest, and one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China Mission, as it existed in the 17th-18th centuries. His current title is Servant of God....

and Michele Ruggieri

Michele Ruggieri

Michele Ruggieri was an Italian Jesuit priest. One of the founding fathers of the Jesuit China missions, and a co-author of the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary, he can be described as the first European sinologist.-Formation years in Europe:Before entering the Society of Jesus Michele...

for their Portuguese-Chinese dictionary — the first ever European-Chinese dictionary. Unfortunately, the manuscript was misplaced in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and not re-discovered until 1934. The dictionary was finally published in 2001. During the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of his Jesuit colleague Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560-1640), compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary as well, in which tones of the romanized Chinese syllables were indicated with diacritical marks. This work has also been lost and not rediscovered.

Cattaneo's system, with its accounting for the tones, was not lost, however. It was used e.g. by Michał Boym and his two Chinese assistants in the first publication of the original and Romanized text of the Nestorian Stele

Nestorian Stele

The Nestorian Stele is aTang Chinese stele erected in 781 that documents 150 years of history of early Christianity in China. It is a 279-cm tall limestone block with text in both Chinese and Syriac, describing the existence of Christian communities in several cities in northern China...

, which appeared in China Illustrata (1667) — an encyclopedic-scope work compiled by Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine...

.
The transcription of the Nestorian Stele can be found in pp. 13-28 of China Illustrata, which is available online on Google Books. The same book also has a catechism

Catechism

A catechism , i.e. to indoctrinate) is a summary or exposition of doctrine, traditionally used in Christian religious teaching from New Testament times to the present...

in Romanized Chinese, using apparently the same transcription with tone marks (pp. 121-127).

Later on, many linguistically comprehensive systems were made by the Protestants, such as the Legge romanization

Legge romanization

Legge romanization is a transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, used by the prolific 19th century sinologist James Legge. It was replaced by the Wade-Giles system, which itself has been mostly supplanted by Pinyin...

. In their missionary activities they had contact with many languages in Southeast Asia, and they created systems that could be used consistently across all of the languages they were concerned with.

Wade-Giles

The first system to be widely accepted was the (1859) system of the British diplomat Thomas Wade

Thomas Francis Wade

Sir Thomas Francis Wade, GCMG, KCB , was a British diplomat and Sinologist who produced a syllabary in 1859 that was later amended, extended and converted into the Wade-Giles romanization for Mandarin Chinese by Herbert Giles in 1892...

, revised and improved by Herbert Giles

Herbert Giles

Herbert Allen Giles was a British diplomat and sinologist, educated at Charterhouse. He modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system earlier established by Thomas Wade, resulting in the widely known Wade-Giles Chinese transliteration system...

into the (1892) Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles

system. Apart from the correction of a number of ambiguities and inconsistencies within the Wade system, the innovation of the Wade-Giles system was that it also indicated tones.

A major drawback of the Wade-Giles system was that it demanded the use of apostrophes, diacritic

Diacritic

al marks, and superscript digits (such as Ch'üeh⁴), all of which, despite their crucial significance, were often omitted in non-specialist texts; therefore, without matched character(s), the "Chinese" syllables did not convey the Mandarin pronunciation and might be deeply ambiguous.

EFEO system

Main article: EFEO Chinese transcription
EFEO Chinese transcription
The Chinese transcription of the École française d'Extrême-Orient was the most used phonetic transcription of Chinese in the French speaking world until the middle of the 20th century. It was created by Séraphin Couvreur of the aforesaid institute in 1902...

The system devised in 1902 by Séraphin Couvreur of the École française d'Extrême-Orient
École française d'Extrême-Orient
The École française d'Extrême-Orient is a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies. Translated into English, it approximately means the French School of the Far East. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in what was then French Indochina. After independence, its...

was used in most of the French-speaking world to transliterate Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, after what it was gradually replaced by hanyu pinyin.

Postal System

The Chinese Postal Map Romanization, standardized in 1906, was based on French styles of romanization, and was exclusively used for place names.

Yale system

The Yale Romanization

Yale Romanization

The Yale romanizations are four systems created at Yale University for romanizing the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese...

system was created at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

to facilitate communication between American military personnel and their Chinese counterparts. It uses a more regular spelling of Mandarin phonemes than other systems of its day.

This system was used for a long time, because it was used for phrase-book usage and part of the Yale system of teaching Chinese. The Yale system taught Mandarin using spoken, colloquial Chinese patterns. Furthermore, in the 1960s and 1970s, in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.A., the choices of learning simple or traditional characters and using either Hanyu Pinyin or Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...

had political overtones of aligning with the Communist Party of China

Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...

or the Kuomintang

Kuomintang

The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...

respectively. Many Overseas Chinese

Overseas Chinese

Overseas Chinese are people of Chinese birth or descent who live outside the Greater China Area . People of partial Chinese ancestry living outside the Greater China Area may also consider themselves Overseas Chinese....

and Western academics took sides. The Yale textbooks, Yale teaching system, and Yale Romanization system represented a "third way" and appeared, consequently, as a kind of neutral choice. The Yale system has since been superseded by the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system.

Qieyin Xinzi

The first modern indigenous Chinese romanization system, the Qieyin Xinzi ("New Phonetic Alphabet") was developed in 1892 by Lu Zhuangzhang (盧戇章) (1854–1928). It was used to write the sounds of the Xiamen dialect of the Southern Min

Min Nan

The Southern Min languages, or Min Nan , are a family of Chinese languages spoken in southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, Taiwan, and southern Zhejiang provinces of China, and by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora....

language. Some people also invented other phoneme systems.

Bopomofo

Wu Jingheng

Woo Tsin-hang

Woo Tsin-hang , born Wu Tiao , with the courtesy name Chih-hui , was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation that created Zhuyin and standardized Guoyu pronunciation.Woo Tsin-hang was born in Wujin ,...

(吳敬恆) (who had developed a "beansprout alphabet") and Wang Zhao (王照) (who had developed a Mandarin alphabet, Guanhua Zimu, in 1900) and Lu Zhuangzhang were part of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation

Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation

The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was established in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin, and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.- History :It was decided in a draft on August 7, 1912, a month...

(1912–1913), which developed the rudimentary Jiyin Zimu (記音字母) system of Zhang Binglin

Zhang Binglin

Zhang Binglin was a Chinese philologist, textual critic and anti-Manchu revolutionary.His philological works include Wen Shi , the first systematic work of Chinese etymology...

into the Mandarin-specific phonetic system now known as Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) or Bopomofo, which was eventually proclaimed on November 23, 1918.

The significant feature of Bopomofo is that it is composed entirely of "ruby characters" which can be written beside any Chinese text whether written vertically, right-to-left, or left-to-right. The characters within the Bopomofo system are unique phonetic characters, and are not part of the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

. In this way, it is not technically a form of romanization, but because it is used for phonetic transcription the alphabet is often grouped with the romanization systems.

Gwoyeu Romatzyh

In 1923, the KMT's Ministry of Education instituted a National Language Unification Commission which, in turn, formed an eleven member romanization unit. The political circumstances of the time prevented any positive outcome from the formation of this unit.

A new voluntary working subcommittee was independently formed by a group of five scholars who strongly advocated romanization. The committee, which met twenty-two times over a twelve month period (1925–1926), consisted of Zhao Yuanren

Yuen Ren Chao

Chao Yuen Ren was a Chinese American linguist and amateur composer. He made important contributions to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar....

, Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.-Youth:Lin was born in...

, Qian Xuantong

Qian Xuantong

Qian Xuantong was a Chinese linguist.-Biography:Born in Huzhou, Zhejiang, Qian was named 錢夏錢夏 at birth, and was given the courtesy name Deqian trained in traditional Chinese philology. After receiving his university education in Japan, Qian held a number of teaching positions in mainland China...

, Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), and one Wang Yi. They developed the Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh

system, proclaimed on September 26, 1928. The most distinctive aspect of this new system was that, rather than relying upon marks or numbers, it indicated the tonal variations of the "root syllable" by a systematic variation within the spelling of the syllable itself. The entire system could be written with a standard QWERTY keyboard.

…the call to abolish [the written] characters in favour of a romanized alphabet reached a peak around 1923. As almost all of the designers of [Gwoyeu Romatzyh] were ardent supporters of this radical view, it is only natural that, aside from serving the immediate auxiliary role of sound annotation, etc., their scheme was designed in such a way that it would be capable of serving all functions expected of a bonafide writing system, and supersede [the written Chinese] characters in due course.

Despite the fact that it was created to eventually replace Chinese characters, and that it was constructed by linguists, Gwoyeu Romatzyh was never extensively used for any purpose other than delivering the pronunciation of specific Chinese characters in dictionaries. And, while the "within syllable" indication of the tone made sense to Western users, the complexity of its tonal system was such that it was never popular with Chinese users.

Latinxua Sinwenz

The work towards constructing the Latinxua Sinwenz

Latinxua Sinwenz

Latinxua Sin Wenz is a little-used romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It was usually written without tones under the assumption that the proper tones could be understood from context....

system began in Moscow as early as 1928 when the Soviet Scientific Research Institute on China sought to create a means through which the large Chinese population living in the far eastern region of the U.S.S.R. could be made literate, facilitating their further education.

This was significantly different from all other romanization schemes in that, from the very outset, it was intended that the Latinxua Sinwenz system, once established, would supersede the Chinese characters. They decided to use the Latin alphabet because they thought that it would serve their purpose better than the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. Unlike Gwoyeu Romatzyh, with its complex method of indicating tones, Latinxua Sinwenz system does not indicate tones at all, and it is not Mandarin-specific and so could be used for other Chinese languages and dialects.

The eminent Moscow-based Chinese scholar Qu Qiubai

Qu Qiubai

Qu Qiubai was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, China. He was a leader of the Communist Party of China in the late 1920s.-Early life:...

(1899–1935) and the Russian linguist V.S. Kolokolov (1896–1979) devised a prototype romanization system in 1929.

In 1931 a coordinated effort between the Soviet sinologists B.M. Alekseev, A.A. Dragunov and A.G. Shrprintsin, and the Moscow-based Chinese scholars Qu Qiubai, Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu (林伯渠), Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao, and Xu Teli established the Latinxua Sinwenz system. The system was supported by a number of Chinese intellectuals such as Guo Moruo

Guo Moruo

Guo Moruo , courtesy name Dingtang , was a Chinese author, poet, historian, archaeologist, and government official from Sichuan, China.-Family history:Guo, originally named Guo Kaizhen, was born on November 10 or 16, in the small town of Shawan...

and Lu Xun

Lu Xun

Lu Xun or Lu Hsün , was the pen name of Zhou Shuren , one of the major Chinese writers of the 20th century. Considered by many to be the leading figure of modern Chinese literature, he wrote in baihua as well as classical Chinese...

, and trials were conducted amongst 100,000 Chinese immigrant workers for about four years and later, in 1940–1942, in the communist-controlled Shaanxi

Shaanxi

' is a province in the central part of Mainland China, and it includes portions of the Loess Plateau on the middle reaches of the Yellow River in addition to the Qinling Mountains across the southern part of this province...

-Gansu

Gansu

' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.It lies between the Tibetan and Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east...

-Ningxia

Ningxia

Ningxia, formerly transliterated as Ningsia, is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. Located in Northwest China, on the Loess Plateau, the Yellow River flows through this vast area of land. The Great Wall of China runs along its northeastern boundary...

Border Region of China. In November 1949, the railways in China's north-east adopted the Latinxua Sinwenz system for all their telecommunications.

For a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in Northern China; and more than 300 publications totalling half a million issues appeared in Latinxua Sinwenz. However:

In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the communist-controlled areas [of China] on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system. It is more likely that, as the communists prepared to take power in a much wider territory, they had second thoughts about the rhetoric that surrounded the latinization movement; in order to obtain the maximum popular support, they withdrew support from a movement that deeply offended many supporters of the traditional writing system.

Hanyu Pinyin

In October 1949, the Association for Reforming the Chinese Written Language was established. Wu Yuzhang (one of the creators of Latinxua Sinwenz) was appointed Chairman. All of the members of its initial governing body belonged to either the Latinxua Sinwenz movement (Ni Haishu (倪海曙), Lin Handa (林汉达), etc.) or the Gwoyeu Romatzyh movement (Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), Luo Changpei

Luo Changpei

Luo Changpei was a Chinese linguist. He made important contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology. He was also a pioneer of the modern studies of Chinese dialects and of non-Chinese languages in China....

(羅常培), etc.). For the most part, they were also highly trained linguists. Their first directive (1949–1952) was to take "the phonetic project adopting the Latin alphabet" as "the main object of [their] research"; linguist Zhou Youguang

Zhou Youguang

Zhou Youguang is a Chinese linguist who is often credited as the "father of Hanyu Pinyin", the official romanization for Mandarin in the People's Republic of China. He was born in Changzhou.-Education and early career:...

was put in charge of this branch of the committee.

In a speech delivered on January 10, 1958, Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976...

observed that the Committee had spent three years attempting to create a non-Latin Chinese phonetic alphabet (they had also attempted to adapt Zhuyin Fuhao) but "no satisfactory result could be obtained" and "the Latin alphabet was then adopted". He also emphatically stated:

In future, we shall adopt the Latin alphabet for the Chinese phonetic alphabet. Being in wide use in scientific and technological fields and in constant day-to-day usage, it will be easily remembered. The adoption of such an alphabet will, therefore, greatly facilitate the popularization of the common speech [i.e. Putonghua].

The development of the Hanyu Pinyin system was a complex process involving decisions on many difficult issues, such as:

Should Hanyu Pinyin's pronunciation be based on that of Beijing?
Was Hanyu Pinyin going to supersede Chinese written characters altogether, or would it simply provide a guide to pronunciation?
Should the traditional Chinese writing system be simplified?
Should Hanyu Pinyin use the Latin alphabet?
Should Hanyu Pinyin indicate tones in all cases (as with Gwoyeu Romatzyh)?
Should Hanyu Pinyin be Mandarin-specific, or adaptable to other dialects and other Chinese languages?
Was Hanyu Pinyin to be created solely to facilitate the spread of Putonghua throughout China?

Despite the fact that the "Draft Scheme for a Chinese Phonetic Alphabet" published in "People's China" on March 16, 1956 contained certain unusual and peculiar characters, the Committee for Research into Language Reform soon reverted to the Latin Alphabet, citing the following reasons:

The Latin alphabet is extensively used by scientists regardless of their native tongue, and technical terms are frequently written in Latin.
The Latin alphabet is simple to write and easy to read. It has been used for centuries all over the world. It is easily adaptable to the task of recording Chinese pronunciation.
While the use of the Cyrillic alphabet would strengthen ties with the U.S.S.R., the Latin alphabet is familiar to most Russian students, and its use would strengthen the ties between China and many of its Southeast Asian neighbours who are already familiar with the Latin alphabet.
As a response to Mao Zedong's remark that "cultural patriotism" should be a "weighty factor" in the choice of an alphabet: despite the fact that the Latin alphabet is "foreign" it will serve as a strong tool for economic and industrial expansion; and, moreover, the fact that two of the most patriotic Chinese, Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, were such strong advocates of the Latin alphabet indicates that the choice does not indicate any lack of patriotism.
On the basis that the British, French, Germans, Spanish, Polish and Czechoslovakians have all modified the Latin alphabet for their own usage, and because the Latin alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet, which, in turn came from Phoenician and Egyptian, there is as much shame attached to using the Latin alphabet as there is in using Arabic numerals and the conventional mathematical symbols, regardless of their point of origin.

The movement for language reform came to a standstill during the Cultural Revolution

Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...

and nothing was published on language reform or linguistics from 1966 to 1972. The Pinyin subtitles that had first appeared on the masthead of the People's Daily

People's Daily

The People's Daily is a daily newspaper in the People's Republic of China. The paper is an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China , published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million. In addition to its main Chinese-language edition, it has editions in English,...

newspaper and the Hong Qi ("Red Flag") Journal in 1958 did not appear at all between July 1966 and January 1977.

In its final form Hanyu Pinyin:

was used to indicate pronunciation only
was exclusively based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect
included tone marks
embodied the traditional "initial sound", "final sound", and "suprasegmental tone” model
was written in the Latin alphabet

Hanyu Pinyin has developed from Mao's 1951 directive, through the promulgation on November 1, 1957 of a draft version by the State Council, to its final form being approved by the State Council in September 1978, to being accepted in 1982 by the International Organization for Standardization

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

as the standard for transcribing Chinese.

Other transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems. The Phagspa script

Phagspa script

The Phags-pa script was an alphabet designed by the Tibetan Lama 'Gro-mgon Chos-rgyal 'Phags-pa for Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, as a unified script for the literary languages of the Yuan Dynasty....

, for example, has helped reconstruct the pronunciation of pre-modern forms of Chinese but it totally ignores tone.
There is a single widespread system for Cyrillization of Chinese

Cyrillization of Chinese

The Cyrillization of Chinese is effected using the Palladius system for transcribing Chinese characters into the Cyrillic alphabet. It was created by Pyotr Ivanovich Kafarov , a Russian sinologist and monk who spent 30 years in China and was also known by his monastic name Palladius...

, that is the Palladius system. The Dungan language

Dungan language

The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China.-History:...

(a variety of Mandarin used by the Dungan people of Central Asia

Central Asia

Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...

) was once written in the Latin script but now employs Cyrillic.

Xiao'erjing is a system for transcribing Chinese using the Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the Arabic script as it is codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right to left, in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters. Because letters usually stand for consonants, it is classified as an abjad.-Consonants:The Arabic alphabet has...

.

The ongoing Science and Civilization in China project uses another romanization scheme, similar to Wade-Giles. The most noticeable difference is that an "h" is inserted for aspiration (where Wade-Giles would use an apostrophe). Thus Hanyu Pinyin tiān / Wade-Giles t'ien¹ is rendered thien. See the SCC extract The Theoretical Background of Laboratory Alchemy as an example of this scheme in use.

External links

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