This Week in History recalls memorable and decisive events and personalities of the past.
26 September 1928 – The Nationalist government of China adopted Gwoyeu Romatzyh as the official system for the romanization of Mandarin Chinese
Chinese written script is one of the oldest writing systems in the world, and the one which has been in continuous usage the longest. It evolved out of pictographs, pictures representing words.
Modern Chinese writing is a logogram system, that is a system where each character represents a word or morpheme as opposed to alphabet systems, where characters represent sounds within the language.
Chinese script went through several variations until settling more or less on its most common modern version “regular script” sometime around the year 230 A.D. By the 5th century, “regular script” had become the dominant form of Chinese writing.
The use of a common writing system across the Chinese empire, was driven by the imperial examination, introduced in 605 A.D., and were used by the Chinese empire to select civil servants. China developed one of the world’s first and most advanced state bureaucracies and people across the empire would study Chinese classics, literature, and writing in order to pass these exams, which would open the door to a life with a secure income and advanced social standing.
This system is what unified Chinese culture and identity across a huge and diverse part of the world and in many ways is the basis of the Chinese “nation”. The system was also unique in reducing the power of the nobility and introducing meritocracy into Chinese governance, being one of the first states in history to do so.
Chinese characters thus became associated with this elite class of scholar- bureaucrats who expected excellence in their writing. Whilst Chinese characters would be adopted by neighbouring nations like Japan, the complexity of the system proved a barrier to outside visitors who wanted to transmit written knowledge. Learning a foreign language, especially one of a different linguistic family is difficult enough without also having to learn a complex writing system wildly different from the alphabet systems used from India to Europe.
One of the first groups of outsiders to bring written texts into China were Buddhist missionaries from India and Central Asia who sought to translate the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) into Chinese. The first of these was a missionary called An Shigao, who was allegedly a former prince from Central Asia or Persia who produced the first translations of Indian Buddhist texts into written Chinese in the 2nd century A.D.
The introduction of the Latin alphabet into China was done by another group of missionaries, this time Catholic missionaries from Portugal, who in the 1580s produced the first Portuguese–Chinese dictionary.
One of the difficulties in translating Chinese into European languages is that Chinese is a tonal language, where the tone used to pronounce a word drastically changes the meaning. See this extract from an article in The Atlantic, written by John McWhorter:
“Take the word ma. If you say it the way an English-speaker would say it, just reading it sitting by itself on a page, then it means ‘scold.’ Say ma as if you were looking for your mother—ma?—and it means ‘rough.’ If you were just whining at her—’ma-a-a?!?’—with your voice swooping down a bit and then back up even higher, that would mean, believe it or not, ‘horse.’ And if you say ma on a high pitch, as if you were singing the first syllable of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as ma instead of ‘oh’ for some reason, that would actually mean mother. That’s the way almost every syllable works in Chinese.”
Translators have taken a variety of approaches to solving this problem, sometimes spelling words pronounced with different tones differently, sometimes even just adding numbers to indicate which tone a word like “ma” needs to be pronounced with.
During the Qing dynasty period of 1644 to 1912, China experienced a period of relative stagnation culturally, technologically, and politically. In the 1800s the Chinese Empire was humiliated in a number of wars and suffered the enormous Taiping rebellion between 1850 and 1864, which led to the deaths of around 25 million people. By the beginning of the 20th century, China was barely a country, with the great powers of Europe, the United States, and Japan effectively dividing up the country into spheres of influence.
This sparked a movement within China which sought to modernize China and embrace many Western cultural practices and ideas in the hope of reviving China and returning it to its former glory as the most powerful and prosperous nation on Earth.
The weakening of the Qing dynasty and some attempts at reform followed but were not enough to save the Qing. In 1911, a rebellion broke out and nearly overthrew the Qing monarchy. The Qing brought in former prime minister and general Yuan Shikai to defend them. He initially crushed the rebels in battle, but then switched sides and helped to overthrow the last Qing monarch.
The rebellion against the Qing was led by Sun Yat-sen, who lead the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT). He was a Christian convert and was educated in Hawaii whilst growing up. He went on to study medicine in Hong Kong and became the intellectual hero of modern China. He is revered today both in Taiwan and in Red China.
Whilst the Qing dynasty fell and the Republic of China was declared, the revolution was only partly successful, Yuan Shikai replaced Sun Yat-Sen as president of the new Republic and then went on to declare himself emperor of China in 1915 and then give up the throne to return to being President. He died in 1916.
In the aftermath China disintegrated into chaos. Warlords took control over vast areas of the country, disorder reigned, and bandits appeared everywhere. Sun Yat-Sen returned to China after being exiled during Yuan Shikai’s reign and then restarted the Chinese Republic with a plan to reunify China. For this purpose, he allied with the Chinese Communist Party.
It was during this period of reunification and modernization that the KMT government introduced the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system. This was an attempt to move China closer to the West and reform Chinese language to use the Latin alphabet. It was though that with the same alphabet translation of foreign texts would be easier and Chinese would be easier to learn for foreigners. It was also thought with the new system Chinese speakers would not struggle as much learning Western languages. The complex Chinese writing system was seen by many Chinese nationalists as an outdated relic of an old China which was too arcane and difficult. As part of these language reform efforts, the KMT wanted to also replace the written literary Chinese with writing that more closely reflected how ordinary people actually spoke.
It was hoped that the new Latin alphabet and more ordinary Chinese would help to unify Chinese identity behind the new modern Republic.
On the 26th of September 1928, the KMT government adopted Gwoyeu Romatzyh as the standard and hoped that eventually Chinese characters could be entirely replaced.
However, due to the chaos in China at the time and the lack of central working government structures, the KMT struggled to implement the reforms. It also faced opposition within academic circles for being too complex and by other Latinization systems who believed their reforms were superior. It was also opposed by many ordinary people because it was thought to be too close to the Bejing dialect of Chinese and not a truly “national” language as it supposed to be.
It was never adopted by the Chinese communists, and when the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949, Gwoyeu Romatzyh was largely abandoned on the Chinese mainland. It remained in official use by the Taiwanese government until it was abandoned in 1986 and replaced with the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II system.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend