Throughout history, many different ways
have been devised to represent the sounds of spoken Chinese phonetically,
whether as auxiliary systems for indicating pronunciation or as totally new
orthographies to replace Chinese characters.
While most systems use a version of the Latin/Roman alphabet and are
therefore known as 'romanization' or 'latinization', there were also alphabetic
systems that were not based on the Latin alphabet.
In the Yuan dynasty (1206-1368 AD), the
‘Phagspa (八思巴) script, which had been created by Tibetan
Buddhist monks to represent the Mongolian language, was used to transcribe Old
Mandarin. The script was written from
top to bottom and lines proceeded from right to left. The ‘Phagspa script has some significance for linguistic studies
of Chinese. It has been used as one
kind of evidence for reconstructing the pronunciation of the period.
It is no surprise that the first to try to
alphabetize Chinese were non-Chinese, who were after all accustomed to
alphabetic writing to start with. The
first Europeans to attempt the romanization of Chinese were Jesuit missionaries
who came to China towards the end of the Ming dynasty. One system was created in 1605 by the famous
priest and scientist Matteo Ricci (利马窦);
another one was created in 1625 by Nicolas Trigault (金尼阁).
After the Opium War of 1839-1842, which
opened China’s door to foreigners to an unprecedented degree, more missionaries
came to China to spread Christianity.
They were mainly concentrated in the coastal regions of the southeast.
The missionaries created romanization systems for dialects spoken in those
areas to help their converts, who were mostly illiterate, read religious
materials.
The most well-known and commonly used romanization system for a long time was the Wade-Giles system, created by Sir Thomas Wade (1818-1895) and revised by H.A. Gi]es (1845-1939) and further modified by R.H. Matthews in his Matthew's Chinese-English Dictionary (1963). It was used until recently by the Library of Congress and all news organizations.
Then of course, there were the various
alphabetic systems to represent Northwest Mandarin by the Chinese Muslims from
Northwest China, i.e., the Dungans (东干人), who fled to central Asian in the Qing
dynasty due to religious persecution.
Their Mandarin dialect was first written in Arabic and then in the
Russian Cyrillic script. As the Dungans
were illiterate in Chinese characters, the Dungan script acquired the status of
official orthography, being used in newspapers and school textbooks.
The native attempts at phonetic
transcription were started mainly at the end of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th century, when China ended its long history of a closed
and feudal society. The reform of the
Chinese language, including its writing system, was part of the efforts to
bring China into the modern age. The
phonetic transcription systems proposed were not all based on the Latin
alphabet.
One such system was Guānhuà Zìmǔ (官话字母, ‘Mandarin letters’) by Wang Zhao,
which was based on the Japanese Katakana symbols. It was banned, most probably due to political reasons. Then GuóyīnZìmǔ (国音字母, ‘Mandarin sound letters’)
was proposed in 1918, which was the precursor of the present system of Zhùyīn
fúhào (注音符号, ‘symbols for transcribing sound’, also known as bopomofo). It was used in Mainland China until the
50's and is still used in Taiwan and some overseas Chinese communities. This system used phonetic symbols derived
from parts of Chinese characters.
Recently, there has been some attempt in Taiwan to introduce
a system with Latin alphabet to replace the bopomofo system.
On the other hand, two systems based on the Latin alphabet were developed in the 1930s. Gwoyeu Romatzyh System （国语罗马字, ‘romanized letters for Mandarin’）was devised by Chinese linguists such as Y.R. Chao （赵元任）and adopted by the government in 1932 (for detailed introduction to the system, see http://home.iprimus.com.au/richwarm/gr/gr.htm and http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk/write_gr_spell.htm ). In the Russian Far East in the 1930s, some Chinese revolutionaries like Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白) and Russian linguists developed Latinhua sin wenz (拉丁化新文字，’Latinized new orthography’) for illiterate Chinese workers in that region. This system was the precursor to the Pīnyīn system (拼音, ‘spell sound’), created in the 1950's in Mainland China. Pinyin now is the most widely used and has been recently adopted by international news agencies.
The question of how best to write the Chinese language is by no means settled. Whole new systems are still being proposed. Revisions to existing systems are also being debated. The issues involved include the treatment of homophones, the representation of tones and the problem of writing the dialects.