Гвоейю Роматзы: Қытай тілін латын әрпімен жазу жүйесі

Mandarin Chinese romanization system

Gwoyeu Romatzyh, 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. However, later study comparing the tonal accuracy of students reading aloud from either Gwoyeu Romatzyh or pinyin has not substantiated Chao's hypothesis. In September 1928, the Republic of China adopted Gwoyeu Romatzyh as the national romanization system for Standard Chinese. 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. 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. Tonal spelling, Gwoyeu Romatzyh's most distinctive feature, was first suggested to Yuen Ren Chao by Lin Yutang (1895–1976); by 1922, Chao had already established the main principles of the system. During 1925 and 1926, its details were developed by a team of five linguists under the auspices of the National Languages Committee. On 26 September 1928, Gwoyeu Romatzyh was officially adopted by the Republic's nationalist government—led at the time by the Kuomintang (KMT). The corresponding entry in Chao's diary, written in GR, reads ("G. R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!") It was intended for use alongside the existing bopomofo system, hence its alternative designation as the "Second Pattern of the National Alphabet". Both systems were used to indicate the revised standard of pronunciation in the new official Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use of 1932. 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. During the 1930s, two short lived attempts were made to teach Gwoyeu Romatzyh to railway workers and peasants in Henan and Shandong. 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. 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. Ultimately, like Latinxua Sin Wenz, GR failed to gain widespread support, principally because the "national" language was too narrowly based on the Beijing dialect: "a sufficiently precise and strong language norm had not yet become a reality in China". 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. 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 教育部国语辞典 dictionary. It was officially replaced in 1986 by the modified Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II system.

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". 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. This represented a radical departure from hyphenation used in Wade–Giles forms, e. g. Kuo2 yü3 Lo2 ma3 tzu4.