Was there pinyin in ancient China?

China originally did not have a pinyin alphabet, and used the method of straight tone or reverse cut to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Straight tone is to use homophonic characters to indicate the pronunciation of a character.

The inverse cut is to use two Chinese characters to give the pronunciation of another Chinese character, and to use two Chinese characters to give the pronunciation of one Chinese character. It is a traditional way of noting the pronunciation of a Chinese character and an ancient Chinese analysis of the phonetic structure of Chinese characters. The first character is the reverse-cut upper character, indicating the consonant of the character being cut; the second character is the reverse-cut lower character, indicating the rhyme and pronunciation.

The Chinese people's own Hanyu Pinyin movement began with the Cheyenne Character Movement in the late Qing Dynasty.

After the Opium War, some patriotic intellectuals put forward the idea of education to save the country. Liang Qichao, Shen Xue, Lu Duanzhang, and Wang Zhaoshi all unanimously pointed out that the complexity of Chinese characters was the reason why education could not be popularized, and thus started a "Hanyu Pinyin Movement".

The pinyin alphabets proposed in the movement of phonetic symbols are many and varied, and can be roughly summarized into three systems:

① Pseudo-Kana system: imitating Japanese kana and adopting Chinese radicals as pinyin symbols. ", in 1901, Wang Zhao's "official Chinese phonetic alphabet" and so on belong to the kana system.

② Shorthand system: the use of shorthand symbols as pinyin symbols. 1896 to 1897, published in the two years of Cai Xiyong's "fast characters", Shen Xue's "Shengshi Vowels", Wang Bingyao's "Pinyin Characters" and other books proposed in the program belong to the shorthand system.

3) Latin system: Latin letters are used as pinyin symbols. 1906 Zhu Wenxiong's Jiangsu New Alphabet, 1908 Liu Mengyang's Chinese Phonetic Alphabet and Jiang Kanghu's General Characters, and 1909 Huang Xubaibai's Latin Conjectures all belong to the Latin system.

In February 1913, the Pronunciation Unification Conference was held in Beijing, the main task of the conference was to "finalize the pronunciation of all words in the national phonetic system" and "to adopt the alphabet". The meeting lasted more than three months. At this meeting, the pronunciation of 6500 Chinese characters was finalized, and the "standard national pronunciation" was determined by the method of voting by the representatives of each province; a set of phonetic alphabets was drawn up, ****39, which adopted the stroke style of the Chinese characters, the letters were chosen from the ancient Chinese characters, and the syllables adopted the triple spelling system of consonants, rhymes and tones, and the inverse cut of the duplex was improved, and its use was only for marking the pronunciation of the words. The syllables are in triple spelling of consonants, rhymes and tones, and the back-cutting method of double spelling has been improved. This set of phonetic alphabets was later reduced to 37 (12 consonants, 13 rhymes, and 3 mediators, almost half the number of alphabets in the ShuangPin scheme of cutting phonetic characters.

After the adoption of the phonetic alphabet, it was shelved for five years before it was officially announced by the Ministry of Education of the Beiyang government in 1918.

The phonetic alphabet was popularized in 1920 through the opening of the "National Language Training Centers" and the "Summer National Language Seminars" throughout the country. In 1920, "Chinese Language Training Centers" and "Summer Chinese Language Seminars" were set up all over China, and the phonetic alphabet was promoted, and all elementary school classes were changed to vernacular language classes, and all elementary school textbooks used phonetic alphabets for Chinese characters. From 1920 to 1958, the phonetic alphabet was used in China for nearly 40 years. In 1930, some officials in the upper echelons felt that the name "phonetic alphabet" was not good and changed it to "phonetic symbol" to emphasize that it was not a parallel script to the Chinese characters.

1944

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, work began immediately on the development of a pinyin scheme, and in October 1949 a civil society organization, the China Association for the Reform of the Chinese Character System (CARCCS), was established to discuss the question of which alphabet to use for the pinyin scheme. The committee set up a "Pinyin Program Study Committee" to discuss the question of which alphabet to use in the pinyin program.

On October 15, 1955, the National Conference on Pinyin Reform was held in Beijing. In his speech, Mr. Ye Lai-shi said, "During the period from 1952 to 1954, the Research Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Character System was mainly engaged in the research on the pinyin scheme for the Chinese characters in strokes, and after three years of searching, it had formulated several drafts, which were put into the Preliminary Draft of the Hanyu Pinyin Scheme (Chinese Characters in Strokes)". At this conference, six draft pinyin schemes were issued to the delegates, four of which were in the Chinese character stroke style, one in the Latin alphabet, and one in the Slavic alphabet. After the conference, Wu Yuzhang, then head of the Chinese Character Reform Committee, reported to Mao Zedong that after three years of working on the national form scheme, it was difficult to get a design that everyone was happy with, and that it would be better to adopt the Latin alphabet. Mao agreed to adopt the Latin alphabet, and it was adopted at a meeting of the central government.

In October 1955, the State Council set up the "Hanyu Pinyin Program Validation Committee", which, after a year's work, put forward the "Draft Amendment" in October 1957, and was adopted as the new "Hanyu Pinyin Program (Draft)" at the 60th meeting of the State Council Plenary on November 1, and was submitted to the National People's Congress for consideration. The Hanyu Pinyin Program was formally approved by the Fifth Session of the First National People's Congress on February 11, 1958, and was introduced into the classrooms of elementary school nationwide in the fall of 1958 as a mandatory course for elementary school students. The Hanyu Pinyin Program is a set of pinyin alphabets and spellings for spelling standardized Mandarin Chinese, and is the legal pinyin program of the People's Republic of China.