The history of pinyin

Before the birth of Pinyin, Chinese characters were mainly recognized by orthography and backcutting.

Direct pronunciation, that is, phonetic notation with homophones, such as "box, read like incense." Pronunciation of complex words with a simple word. But what if you don't even know simple words? Inspired by Sanskrit, with the consciousness of separating phonology, the ancients invented the anti-tangent method.

The reverse cutting method, that is, two words with one sound, is often written as "kua, bitter gourd cuts." Word cutting has no practical significance, that is, taking the bitter initial k, the vowel of the word "melon" and the tone ua 1 together is the pronunciation of "kua".

Chinese Pinyin is also called the Latin scheme of Chinese Pinyin. It must be said that the invention of Chinese Pinyin is a genius idea, and its importance and function for us are far greater than the invention of simplified characters. It not only greatly reduces the difficulty of understanding Chinese characters, but also makes us more handy and comfortable in the information age. If nothing else, just look at our daily mobile phone typing and computer typing, and how many people are using pinyin input method.

Chinese Pinyin is so important to us that we can't live without it in our daily life. Although we may not see Chinese Pinyin every day, it affects us all the time. It has been quietly integrated with Chinese characters, but one is in front of the stage and the other is behind the scenes, just like a double-reed performance, one is performing in front and the other is making sounds in the back.

However, hanyu pinyin, which is so important to us, was not invented in China, nor was it originally created for us by China. Only later did we learn from it and carry it forward. No wonder when we first learned English, we always felt that the pronunciation and writing of Chinese phonetic symbols were so similar. In fact, it is the reference of English letters (Latin letters).

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a large number of Western missionaries came to China. In order to learn Chinese, they mark Chinese characters with Latin letters, which is similar to the way we mark pronunciation with Chinese characters when learning English now. Over time, they summed up a standard scheme.

The Historical Process of the Development of Chinese Pinyin

In China, the earliest phonetic notation method for Chinese characters is orthography or anticlockwise. Direct pronunciation means using homophones to express the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Backcutting refers to using two Chinese characters to mark another Chinese character and using two Chinese characters to mark the pronunciation of a Chinese character. The first word is a reverse-cut upper word, indicating the initial consonant of the cut word; The second word is a backslash, which means vowel and pronunciation. This is the most traditional phonetic notation of Chinese characters.

Because this method is quite complicated to annotate each Chinese character, its function is limited. Chinese uses Latin alphabet pinyin. 300 years ago, western missionaries first annotated Chinese characters with Latin alphabet for westerners to preach and trade with orientals. The main purpose of their Chinese phonetic notation is to record the language, but for Chinese, it is the enlightenment of Chinese Pinyin, which greatly promotes the development of Chinese.

In the late Qing Dynasty, after the defeat of the Opium War, some patriotic intellectuals put forward the idea of saving the country through education. Liang Qichao, Shen Xue, Lu and Wang Zhao all unanimously pointed out that the difficulty of Chinese characters is the reason why education cannot be popularized, so they launched a "phonetic notation movement".

Actively explore the reform of Chinese language and writing, examine and approve the pronunciation of 6,500 Chinese characters as "national standard pronunciation", and draw up 39 sets of phonetic symbols selected from ancient Chinese characters, with syllables in the three-spelling system of initials, finals and tones. 19 18, the Ministry of education of Beiyang government officially announced the pinyin scheme, which is to unify the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

After the May 4th Movement, the movement of optimizing Chinese characters and unifying Chinese developed further. Since 19 18, Chinese has gone through a romanization movement, which is to simplify Chinese characters and replace them with romanization. However, the Romanization Movement completely abandoned the tradition of Chinese characters and did not fully consider the historical origin of Chinese characters. The romanization of Putonghua has never left the intelligentsia, nor has it been widely implemented in society. Its influence is only a discussion on the reform of Chinese characters.

Modern Chinese Pinyin originated from the Latinized Chinese Character Movement in modern China. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Qu Qiubai, Wu, Lin, Xiao San and others produced party member from China and the Soviet Union. They cooperated with Soviet sinologists Long and Guo Zhisheng to research and create new Latin characters, and Qu Qiubai wrote and published The Latin Alphabet of China and The Latin Alphabet of China.