How The Romanized Chinese Equivalent Pinyin Evolved
Chinese has been regarded as one of the most difficult languages to master
. For the westerner, grown up on a language background of Roman alphabets, two big stumbles are tones and characters. Intonation is an important part of English, but changing the stress applied on certain syllables of a word does not significantly change the meaning of the word. In Chinese, changing the tone of a word can significantly alter its meaning. You can spell and write down an English word by following the pronunciation. In Chinese you wont get any help when you want to write a word by simply listening to its pronunciation, no matter how slow or clear the word is uttered. A lot of new Chinese language learners complain that Chinese characters be just replaced by pinyin, to make the study easier. In fact this is an effort that has been made in the past.
Four hundred years ago in Chinas Ming Dynasty, Christian missionaries from the West were trying hard to find out an easier and efficient way to learn Chinese. Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit priest played initiator in employing Latin letters to mark the sound of words and pronunciation in Chinese. Since then people have tried to make this system more learner friendly. Until the early 20th century, the system was popular only among foreigners, missionaries and businessmen in China.
Realizing that the traditional Chinese writing system hampers China's mass education, many Chinese intellectuals launched a Chinese Romanization movement of their own in early twentieth century. In 1928, Zhao Yuanren, the best linguist in China introduced the Gwoyeu Romotzyh Pinin Faashyh as the standard for Chinese Romanization. Gwoyeu Romatzyh did not use diacritic tone marks, but employed an inventive set of tonal spellings to mark tones. It had been very popular among teachers and students studying Chinese languages in the US. At the same time, many communist revolutionaries were also sympathetic to the idea of Romanization.
From 1920s, the Communist Party of China started taking shape, developing and gaining in power. As an emerging party with a louder voice over the feudal lords, it followed the words of its ally; the former Soviet Union who sanctioned the Romanization of Chinese characters, encouraging its implementation. As a campaign of language reformation, Romanization of Chinese characters into an independent language was propagandized throughout China. In 1931, Qu Qiubai's Latinhua Xinwenz was adopted at a conference by Chinese nationals in the Soviet. This script had no provision for marking tones, and was much simpler than Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Mao Zedong, the former leader of CPC, was a great supporter of Romanization. He felt that the Romanized new language could serve as a great tool to impart ideologies and learning among peasants and the vast majority of Chinas uneducated population. During Second World War in the 1940s, as the leader of the temporary communist government Mao declared that the Romanized Chinese language had the same legitimate right as traditional Chinese characters.
After 1949, the communist government set up a committee to emphasize on the necessity of reforming the language and addressed the possibility of Romanization to comply traditional Chinese languages with the common Latin writing system around the world. After years of consideration, a new scheme called Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an was announced in 1958. However it was only in 1979 that the Hanyu Pinyin came to be adopted as the international standard for Chinese Romanization.
Pinyin has been single handedly instrumental in popularizing the Chinese languages. Many people today are interested in Chinese language tutorials or to study abroad in China. It is interesting to know that pinyin has been treated as an alternative for Chinese characters in Chinese language study, especially for foreigners whose objective is to learn communicative Chinese and improve audible comprehension. Pinyin is being regarded as the transitional stage in Chinese learning. It is also used to help beginners with correct pronunciation. And with online Chinese learning tools, pinyin has made Chinese learning so much quicker. With Chinese pinyin input application, you can type Chinese characters without worrying much about stroke order.
However there are certain drawbacks. Marking tones efficiently for pinyin using certain applications is at times troublesome. It is common for one pinyin spelling to mean different words. While it is possible to understand the pinyin by reading the exact contexts, it will be a huge test to guess the meaning of word or phrases without the context. Also, different character components like prefixes, roots, suffixes would change meaning and message if transferred to Romanized pinyin.
The original Chinese script with its wealth of characters is a great treasury of Chinese culture and tradition. There is a plethora of classical literature which is written in traditional Chinese characters. The substitution of the Chinese character would result in a great loss of these precious resources.
by: Kevin Young
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