by Catriona Ellis
Written Mandarin Chinese is complex and
intricate. The system of characters adopted by the Chinese (commonly called “Hanzi”)
as a method of written communication containing many tens of thousands of
different characters, although it is often said that many of these are tiny
variants found in historical texts. Even so, it is estimated that “functional
literacy in written Chinese requires the knowledge of between three and four
thousand characters” and it is widely acknowledged as one of the hardest
written languages to learn, especially once it is considered that not only
would you have to learn the order of the brush strokes for each character, but
also which tone sound (out of the four used in Mandarin Chinese) to adopt for
each word. This is why the introduction of Pinyin has revolutionised both the
teaching and learning of Mandarin.
Pinyin
is defined as “The official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations
of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in the People’s Republic of
China, Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore.” Essentially it is a way of
writing Chinese characters using the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet and since
its official introduction in 1958 it is now used in schools to allow children
to learn the sounds of words and their meanings via the phonetic Roman
alphabet, for adults who never learnt written Chinese but wish to continue
their studies into adulthood, for foreign people wanting to learn Mandarin but
are unfamiliar with the character system, and within technology to allow
Mandarin to be written with a standard Western keyboard. However, Pinyin was
created only roughly fifty years ago and can owe its creation not to the
Western world, but to Mao Zedong and the communist revolution in China.
In the 1930’s
the leaders of the Communist Party of China established a phonetic alphabet,
called Sin Wenz, using Roman letters. Curiously, this system was developed in
Moskow, because at the time there was a large population of Chinese immigrants
living in the eastern region of the USSR with whom the government could not
communicate. Sin Wenz was created in order to educate and make literate these
people. Thus the motives behind the first romanisation of a language was to aid
teaching, the same purpose as the creation of Pinyin many years later.
Sin Wenz was far more linguistically
sophisticated than previous alphabets, although its one major draw back was that
it did not indicate tone sounds. However, it was highly successful in the USSR
and proved that a phonetic method of teaching was beneficial in the learning of
a language that used characters. It soon spread to China. The Sin Wenz movement
reached a climax in 1940 when Mao Zedong’s Border Regional Government in China “declared
that Sin Wenz had the same legal status as traditional characters in government
and public documents”, and many academics suggested that one day traditional
Chinese characters would be all together replaced and Sin Wenz would be used universally.
However, it became apparent that Sin Wenz was ill suited for writing regional
dialects because of the absence of tone markings and so the majority of Chinese
citizens still had to learn Mandarin in order to use Sin Wenz. Therefore, the
aim of the creation of a phonetic alphabet (to educate the illiterate) had not
been fulfilled and it was clear that a different system would need to be
developed if any change was to be seen within Chinese society.
When
the communist revolution took place in China in 1949, Mao Zedong discovered
that less than 20% of the population could read and it became more urgent that
another phonetic alphabet was established in order to educate the majority of
the population. A Chinese government project was therefore set up with Zhou
Youguang leading a committee to develop a romanisation of written Chinese. The
Hanyu Pinyin system was created by looking at several preexisting systems, (Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Sin Wenz of 1931, and the diacritic markings from zhuyin,) and studying which aspects of which systems had been most
successful before combining them into Hanyu Pinyin. “Hanyu” means “the spoken
language of the Han people” and “pinyin” literally translates to “spelled-out
sounds”. The system was almost immediately successful, revolutionising the
teaching of Mandarin in Chinese schools and increasing the literacy rates by
60% in fifty years. Today about 80% of the population of Beijing can read the
daily newspapers, which creates a far less elitist society because the majority
of the population have access to the same information.
This starts with
teaching the youngest generation to read so that they can grow up with access
to news and written communication. This could not have been possible without
the use of Pinyin in schools to teach children to interpret and create Chinese
characters; in schools the textbooks usually contain both the Chinese character
and Pinyin forms of the words with markings not dissimilar to Western accents
above the Pinyin which indicate what tone sound the word should be pronounced
with. Pupils are able to listen to the word pronounced by the teacher whilst
looking at both the phonetic word and the character, thus learning to recognise
the Chinese characters much more quickly. This system is also used to teach
foreigners the Mandarin pronunciations using an alphabet they understand. This
way, “Westerners” can learn to speak Mandarin without necessarily having to
learn the exceptionally complex written language as well, and, using Pinyin, it
is possible to learn Chinese grammar effectively and relatively quickly, again
without the requirement to master thousands of Chinese characters. Thus, Pinyin
has allowed Mandarin Chinese to become more accessible on a global scale and
has increased diplomatic potential with China because the Western world can
more easily communicate with the Eastern
Zhou Youguang is hailed by many as “the
father of Pinyin”, however, he often says, "I’m
not the father of pinyin, I’m the son of pinyin. It’s [the result of] a long
tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we
restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect." Zhou
also emphasises the importance of literacy within a modern China, declaring in
an interview with Stephen Fry for his program “Fry’s Planet Word”: “If we want a modern country we must have literacy. Education is very
important.” Zhou clearly understood how essential knowledge of written language
was in order to create a more unbiased society and empower the population, a
feat that is becoming more attainable all the time in China.
Furthermore, Pinyin
has greatly influenced the way Mandarin Chinese speakers use technology. A
traditional Chinese typewriter has over 2000 characters and is cumbersome and
time-consuming to use, but with Pinyin, the Roman alphabet can be used on smart
phones and computers. The user simply types the word desired phonetically using
Pinyin and a Western keyboard into the phone or computer and all the related
Chinese characters appear (like spell-checked words appear for a Western user.)
The preferred character can then be selected and will appear in the text, email
or document as wanted. Without Pinyin, Mandarin Chinese speakers who only know
Chinese characters could not use technology like smartphones or use any kind of
word processor today. Consequently, these Chinese citizens would not be able to
interact with those outside of China who didn’t speak their own language and
cultural development would be slow or potentially non-existent.
Technology allows humans to become
more intelligent, inquisitive and communicative and without the invention of
Pinyin within Chinese society, it is highly unlikely that Mandarin Chinese speakers
would be able to access these traits. For example, if a Chinese person could
not use a phonetic keyboard would it ever be possible for them to “Google”
anything? If the Chinese language could not fit its whole alphabet onto an
iPhone screen would Apple have ever had customers in China? These questions,
along with the question of whether literacy rates in China would have ever
risen after the communist revolution without the invention of Pinyin, or
whether Pinyin would even have been created without the Communist Party of
China suggest that if this phonetic system had never been adopted, China would
be far behind the rest of the world economically, culturally and
technologically and could be faced with a future without any means of
communication globally.
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