Gwoyeu Romatzyh 國語羅馬字;国语罗马字 | |
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Script type | romanization |
Created | 1925 |
Time period | |
Languages | Standard Chinese |
Gwoyeu Romatzyh | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Traditional Chinese | 國語羅馬字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 国语罗马字 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Literal meaning | Standard Chinese romanization | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh, [lower-alpha 1] abbreviated GR,is a system for writing Standard Chinese in the Latin alphabet. It was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao,who led a group of linguists to develop the system from 1925 to 1926. From 1942 to 2000,a small number of reference works published in Hong Kong and overseas made use of the system,and Chao would use it throughout his later linguistics work,including in his most influential publications. However,Gwoyeu Romatzyh never achieved widespread use among the Chinese public. In places where it had been used,it was eventually replaced—largely by Hanyu Pinyin (or simply 'pinyin'),which became the international standard romanization during the second half of the 20th century. Pinyin itself made use of principles originally introduced by Gwoyeu Romatzyh,whose influence is often reflected in the design of later systems.
GR indicates the four tones of Standard Chinese by varying the spelling of syllables,rather than by using either diacritics as in pinyin,or numerals as in the earlier Wade–Giles system. The distinct spellings for each tone also vary by syllable according to particular rules. Tonal spelling was originally proposed by Lin Yutang,one of the members of the development team. Chao said that this could possibly aid students of Chinese learning to articulate tones. [1] However,later study comparing the tonal accuracy of students reading aloud from either Gwoyeu Romatzyh or pinyin has not substantiated Chao's hypothesis. [2]
In September 1928,the Republic of China adopted Gwoyeu Romatzyh as the national romanization system for Standard Chinese. [3] It began to see use in Chinese dictionaries,with some proponents hoping that it would eventually replace Chinese characters entirely. However,despite support from linguists both in China and overseas,the public largely lacked interest in the system,or even viewed it with hostility due to its complexity. [lower-alpha 2] In addition,its widespread adoption was hindered by its narrow calibration to the Beijing dialect during a period when the country lacked a strong centralizing government to impose its use. While tonal spelling also features in romanization schemes used for other Asian languages like Hmong and Zhuang,their rules are considerably simpler than those in Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
Following the Xinhai Revolution,the Republic of China replaced the imperial Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Among the Chinese intelligentsia,liberal reformers sought ways to modernize the country's institutions. In 1916,linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) was among the first to propose,in an English-language essay co-authored with the poet and essayist Hu Shih (1891–1962),that the Chinese writing system should be replaced with an alphabet phonetically corresponding to a national variety of the Chinese language. [4] Tonal spelling,Gwoyeu Romatzyh's most distinctive feature,was first suggested to Yuen Ren Chao by Lin Yutang (1895–1976); [5] by 1922,Chao had already established the main principles of the system. [6] During 1925 and 1926,its details were developed by a team of five linguists under the auspices of the National Languages Committee. [7]
On 26 September 1928,Gwoyeu Romatzyh was officially adopted by the Republic's nationalist government—led at the time by the Kuomintang (KMT). [3] [8] The corresponding entry in Chao's diary,written in GR,reads G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hoo-ray!!! ("G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!") [9] It was intended for use alongside the existing bopomofo system,hence its alternative designation as the "Second Pattern of the National Alphabet". [lower-alpha 3] Both systems were used to indicate the revised standard of pronunciation in the new official Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use of 1932. [10] In general,the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh were interested in large-scale reform of the Chinese writing system;these potential reforms often involved adopting Gwoyeu Romatzyh as a primary,practical script for the language. [11] During the 1930s,two short-lived attempts were made to teach Gwoyeu Romatzyh to railway workers and peasants in Henan and Shandong. [12] Support for GR was confined to a small number of trained linguists and sinologists,including Qian Xuantong and Luo Changpei in China and Walter Simon in England. [13] During this period,GR faced increasing hostility because of the complexity of its tonal spelling. Conversely,sinologist Bernhard Karlgren criticized GR for its lack of phonetic rigour. [14] Ultimately,like Latinxua Sin Wenz,GR failed to gain widespread support,principally because the "national" language was too narrowly based on the Beijing dialect: [15] "a sufficiently precise and strong language norm had not yet become a reality in China". [3]
Historical use of Gwoyeu Romatzyh is reflected in the official spelling of the name for the province of Shaanxi,which distinguishes it from that of neighbouring Shanxi;these names differ only by tone,and their systematic pinyin romanizations would be identical without the use of diacritics. [16] The Warring States period state of Wey is often spelled as such to distinguish it from the more prominent state of Wei,whose names are homophonous in Mandarin,but were likely distinct in Old Chinese. Several prominent Chinese people have used GR to transliterate their names,such as the mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern;however,neither Chao nor Lin did. In 1958,the Chinese government officially replaced Gwoyeu Romatzyh with Hanyu Pinyin,which had been developed by a team led by Zhou Youguang over the previous two years. Pinyin is now the predominant system and an international standard used by the United Nations,the Library of Congress,and the International Organization for Standardization,as well as by most students learning Standard Chinese. Its use as a pronunciation aid survived in Taiwan until the 1970s,as in the monolingual Guoyu Cidian dictionary. It was officially replaced in 1986 by the modified Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II system. [17]
An important feature of Gwoyeu Romatzyh, inspired by its precursors and later adopted by pinyin, is the use of consonant pairs with a voicing distinction from Latin to instead represent the aspiration distinction present in Chinese. [18] For example, ⟨b⟩ and ⟨p⟩ represent /p/ and /pʰ/, compared to ⟨p⟩ and ⟨p'⟩ in Wade–Giles. Another distinctive feature is Gwoyeu Romatzyh's use of ⟨j⟩, ⟨ch⟩, and ⟨sh⟩ to represent two different phonetic series. When followed by ⟨i⟩, these letters correspond to the alveolo-palatal series written in pinyin as ⟨j⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩; otherwise, they correspond to the retroflex series written in pinyin as ⟨zh⟩, ⟨ch⟩, and ⟨sh⟩.
Other notable features of Gwoyeu Romatzyh orthography include:
By default, the basic Gwoyeu Romatzyh spelling described above is used for syllables with the first tone. The basic form is then modified to indicate tones 2, 3 and 4. [20] This is accomplished in one of three ways:
Wherever possible, the concise first method is used.
An important principle of Gwoyeu Romatzyh is that text should use spaces as dividers between words. While this has been common practice in European languages since; but in Chinese the concept of "word" is not easy to pin down. The basic unit of speech is popularly thought to be the monosyllable represented by a character, which in most cases represents a meaningful syllable or morpheme, a smaller unit than the "linguistic word". [21] Characters are written and printed with no spaces between words; yet in practice most Chinese words consist of two-syllable compounds, and it was Chao's bold innovation in 1922 to reflect this in GR orthography by grouping the appropriate syllables together into words. [22] This represented a radical departure from hyphenation used in Wade–Giles forms, e.g. Kuo2-yü3 Lo2-ma3-tzu4.
Chao used Gwoyeu Romatzyh in four influential works:
In 1942, Walter Simon introduced Gwoyeu Romatzyh to English-speaking sinologists in a pamphlet entitled The New Official Chinese Latin Script. Over the remainder of the 1940s he published a series of textbooks and readers, as well as a Chinese-English dictionary using GR. His son Harry Simon later went on to use GR in papers he published on Chinese linguistics. [32]
In 1960, Y. C. Liu, who was a colleague of Walter Simon at SOAS, published Fifty Chinese Stories, comprising selections from the Chinese classics. It was a parallel text featuring the original Literary Chinese as well as vernacular translation, [33] in addition to GR and romanized Japanese transliterations prepared by Simon.
Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (1972) incorporated a number of novelties, which included a simplified romanization scheme derived from GR, [34] [35] though Lin eliminated most of the spelling rules.
The first 3 issues of Shin Tarng magazine (1982–1989; Xīntáng) also used a simplified version of Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The fourth issue, now rendered as Xin Talng, used a system that adapted pinyin to use tonal spelling akin to GR. [36]
Chao believed that the benefit of tonal spelling was to make the use of tones in Chinese more salient to learners:
[GR] makes the spelling more complicated, but gives an individuality to the physiognomy of words, with which it is possible to associate meaning ... [A]s an instrument of teaching, tonal spelling has proved in practice to be a most powerful aid in enabling the student to grasp the material with precision and clearness. [37]
For example, it may be easier to memorize the difference between GR Beeijing 'Beijing' and beyjiing 'background' than the pinyin Běijīng and bèijǐng. One study conducted at the University of Oregon from 1991 to 1993 compared the results of teaching elementary level Chinese using either pinyin or GR to two matched groups of students; the study ultimately concluded that "GR did not lead to significantly greater accuracy in tonal production". [38]
Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. In official documents, it is referred to as the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. It is the official system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by the United Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system makes use of diacritics to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts, or when writing non-Chinese words in Chinese-language texts. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries. Hànyǔ literally means 'Han language'—meaning, the Chinese language—while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'.
Wade–Giles is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892.
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, abbreviated MPS II, is a romanization system formerly used in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was created to replace the complex tonal-spelling Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and to co-exist with the popular Wade–Giles (romanization) and Zhuyin (non-romanization). It is sometimes referred to as Gwoyeu Romatzyh 2 or GR2.
Yuen Ren Chao, also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribes Mandarin Chinese pronunciation without diacritics or numbers to indicate tones.
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Latinxua Sin Wenz is a historical set of romanizations for Chinese. Promoted as a revolutionary reform to combat illiteracy and replace Chinese characters, Sin Wenz distinctively does not indicate tones, for pragmatic reasons and to encourage the use of everyday colloquial language. Beifangxua Latinxua Sin Wenz, for Mandarin Chinese, was the original iteration, and a number of variations for various varieties of Chinese were developed by regional Sin Wenz associations.
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Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese. Chinese uses a logographic script and its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems using Roman characters to represent Chinese throughout history. Linguist Daniel Kane wrote, "It used to be said that sinologists had to be like musicians, who might compose in one key and readily transcribe into other keys." The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles and Yale romanization.
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The spelling of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) can be divided into its treatment of initials, finals and tones. GR uses contrasting unvoiced/voiced pairs of consonants to represent aspirated and unaspirated initials in Chinese: for example b and p represent IPA [p] and [pʰ]. The letters j, ch and sh represent two different series of initials: the alveolo-palatal and the retroflex sounds. Although these spellings create no ambiguity in practice, readers more familiar with Pinyin should pay particular attention to them: GR ju, for example, corresponds to Pinyin zhu, not ju.
Simplified Wade, abbreviated SW, is a modification of the Wade–Giles romanization system for writing Standard Mandarin Chinese. It was devised by the Swedish linguist Olov Bertil Anderson (1920–1993), who first published the system in 1969. Simplified Wade uses tonal spelling: in other words it modifies the letters in a syllable in order to indicate tone differences. It is one of only two Mandarin romanization systems that indicate tones in such a way. All other systems use diacritics or numbers to indicate tone.
The Cantonese Romanisation system known as Barnett–Chao is based on the principles of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system (GR) developed by Yuen Ren Chao in the 1920s, which he modified in 1947. The B-C system is a modification in 1950 by K M A Barnett from Yuen Ren Chao's romanisation system. It was adopted by the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (SOAS).
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The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems.
The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to affect a standard accent. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese has a neutral tone that appears on weak syllables.
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The Yale romanization of Mandarin is a system for transcribing the sounds of Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldiers, and was popularized by continued development of that course at Yale. The system approximated Chinese sounds using English spelling conventions, in order to accelerate acquisition of correct pronunciation by English speakers.
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