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Zhuyin
Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan. It consists of 37 characters and five tone marks, which together can transcribe all possible sounds in Mandarin Chinese. Bopomofo was first introduced in China during the 1910s by the Beiyang government, where it was used alongside Wade–Giles, a romanization system which used a modified Latin alphabet. Today, Bopomofo is more common in Taiwan than on the mainland, and is used as the primary electronic input method for Taiwanese Mandarin, as well as in dictionaries and other non-official documents. Terminology ''Bopomofo'' is the name used for the system by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Unicode. Analogous to how the word ''alphabet'' is derived from the names of the first two letters alpha and beta, the name ''bopomofo'' deri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commission On The Unification Of Pronunciation
The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was established by the Republic of China in 1913 in order to address several aspects of Chinese language reform—including selecting an official phonetic transcription system for Mandarin Chinese, as well as standardizing pronunciations for basic Chinese characters. Delegates representing every Chinese province deliberated on the merits of numerous systems, ultimately selecting the design of Zhang Binglin (1869–1936). Zhang's system would serve as the prototype for bopomofo, and would be officially adopted by the Republican government in 1918. History It was decided in a draft on 7 August 1912, a month after a July 10 conference led by Cai Yuanpei, that a set of phonetic symbols were to be used for education purposes. The commission was set up in December and chaired by Wu Zhihui. The Commission ended on 22 May 1913. Wu would later chair the Mandarin Promotion Council. Members The first meeting took place on 15 Febru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taiwanese Mandarin
Taiwanese Mandarin, frequently referred to as ''Guoyu'' () or ''Huayu'' (), is the variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. A large majority of the Taiwanese population is fluent in Mandarin, though many also speak a variety of Min Chinese known as Taiwanese Hokkien, which has had a significant influence on the Mandarin spoken on the island. Mandarin was not a prevalent spoken language in Taiwan before the mid-20th century. Early Chinese immigrants who settled in Taiwan before Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japanese rule mainly spoke other varieties of Chinese languages, primarily Hakka language, Hakka and Hokkien. By contrast, Taiwanese indigenous peoples speak unrelated Austronesian languages. Japan Japanese invasion of Taiwan (1895), annexed Taiwan in 1895 and governed the island as a colony for the next 50 years, introducing Japanese language, Japanese in education, government, and public life. With the defeat of Imperial Japan in World War II, Taiwan was transferred to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Input Method
Several input methods allow the use of Chinese characters with computers. Most allow selection of characters based either on their pronunciation or their graphical shape. Phonetic input methods are easier to learn but are less efficient, while graphical methods allow faster input, but have a steep learning curve. Other methods allow users to write characters directly via touchscreens, such as those found on mobile phones and tablet computers. History Chinese input methods predate the computer. One of the early attempts was an electro-mechanical Chinese typewriter Mingkwai () which was invented by Lin Yutang, a prominent Chinese writer, in the 1940s. It assigned thirty base shapes or strokes to different keys and adopted a new way of categorizing Chinese characters. But the typewriter was not produced commercially and Lin soon found himself deeply in debt. Before the 1980s, Chinese publishers hired teams of workers and selected a few thousand type pieces from an enormous C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wu Zhihui
Wu Jingheng (), commonly known by his courtesy name Wu Zhihui (Woo Chih-hui, ; 1865–1953), also known as Wu Shi-Fee, was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation that created Zhuyin (based on Zhang Binglin's work) and standardized Guoyu pronunciation. Wu became an anarchist during his stay in France in the first decade of the 20th century, along with Li Shizeng, Zhang Renjie, and Cai Yuanpei. With them, he was known as one of the strongly anti-communist "Four Elders" of the Nationalist Party in the 1920s. Career Born into a poor family in Wujin, Jiangsu province as Wu Tiao (), Wu Zhihui was an outstanding student, passing the challenging Juren examination in 1891. He served at the Nanyang College Preparatory School Hall (now the Shanghai Nanyang Model High School). In 1903 in the '' Subao'' newspaper, Wu criticized the Qing government and derided then ruling Empress Dowager Cixi as a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Transliteration
The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems. General Chinese General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for inter-dialectal communication in written Chinese. General Chinese is not wholly a romanisation system, but consists of two alternative systems: one uses Chinese characters as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other is a romanisation system with similar spellings to ''Gwoyeu Romatzyh''. ''Guanhua zimu'' , developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese ''katakana'', which he learn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xiandai Hanyu Cidian
''Xiandai Hanyu Cidian'' ( zh , s = 现代汉语词典 , t = 現代漢語詞典 , p = Xiàndài Hànyǔ Cídiǎn , l = Modern Han Language Word Dictionary ), also known as ''A Dictionary of Current Chinese'' or ''Contemporary Chinese Dictionary'', is an important one-volume dictionary of Standard Mandarin Chinese published by the Commercial Press, now into its 7th (2016) edition. It was originally edited by Lü Shuxiang and Ding Shengshu as a reference work on modern Standard Mandarin Chinese. Compilation started in 1958 and trial editions were issued in 1960 and 1965, with a number of copies printed in 1973 for internal circulation and comments, but due to the Cultural Revolution the final draft was not completed until the end of 1977, and the first formal edition was not published until December 1978. It was the first People's Republic of China dictionary to be arranged according to Hanyu Pinyin, the phonetic standard for Standard Mandarin Chinese, with explanatory notes in s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II) is a romanization system formerly used in Taiwan. It was created to replace the complex Gwoyeu Romatzyh system, which used tonal spelling—and to co-exist with the Wade–Giles romanization as well as bopomofo. It is sometimes referred to as Gwoyeu Romatzyh 2 or GR2. History Based on the earlier and more complex Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the tentative version of MPS II was released on May 10, 1984, by the Ministry of Education under the Chiang Ching-kuo administration. After two years of feedback from the general public, the official version was established on January 28, 1986. To distinguish bopomofo () from MPS II, the former is officially called "Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I" (). Despite its official status for almost two decades until it was replaced by Tongyong Pinyin in 2002, MPS II existed only in some governmental publications (such as travel brochures and dictionaries). However, MPS II was not used for the official romanized names of Ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units. The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers. This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as Southwestern Mandarin, those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect (or are only partially intelligible). Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Because Mandarin originated in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Latin Alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions such as , and extensions such as letters with diacritics, it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Languages of Europe, Europe, languages of Africa, Africa, languages of the Americas, the Americas, and Languages of Oceania, Oceania. Its basic modern inventory is standardized as the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Etymology The term ''Latin alphabet'' may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet. These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semisyllabary
A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosive consonants of the Phoenician alphabet into syllabograms. Out of confusion, the term is sometimes applied to a different alphabetic typology known as abugida, alphasyllabary or neosyllabary, but for the purposes of this article it will be restricted to scripts where some characters are alphabetic and others are syllabic. Iberian semi-syllabaries The Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are a family of scripts developed in the Iberian Peninsula at least from the 5th century BCE – possibly from the 7th century. Some researchers conclude that their origin lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet, while others believe the Greek alphabet also had a role. Paleohispanic semi-syllabaries are typologically unusual because their syllabic and alpha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International Organization For Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Article 3 of the ISO Statutes. ISO was founded on 23 February 1947, and () it has published over 25,000 international standards covering almost all aspects of technology and manufacturing. It has over 800 technical committees (TCs) and subcommittees (SCs) to take care of standards development. The organization develops and publishes international standards in technical and nontechnical fields, including everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, transport, IT, agriculture, and healthcare. More specialized topics like electrical and electronic engineering are instead handled by the International Electrotechnical Commission.Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. 3 June 2021.Inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
