Monthly Archives: April 2023

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 25-26:

As part of a serious education, any learned Chinese down to Wang’s time [c. 1900] would have had to master the reverse-cut method for learning how to pronounce characters. Reverse-cut first appeared in the third century and remained in use until the early twentieth. Each Chinese character has a one-syllable sound associated with it, and all syllables have two parts: an “initial” (the consonant sound that begins a syllable) and a “final” (the rest of the syllable sound). For a guide, a novice would turn to a rhyme book, which functioned like a dictionary of pronunciation. In it, the sound of each listed character was “spelled out” by cutting together two more commonly used and familiar characters. One character’s initial sound was added to another’s final sound to indicate the pronunciation of the character in question. To pronounce the character for “east” 東 (dong), for instance, you would look up 東 in a rhyme book and it would tell you that the pronunciation is the initial of “virtue” 德 ([d]ek) combined with the final of “red” 紅 (h[ong]).

This technique used the phonetic parts of two known characters to sound out an unknown third character in the same way that (5 – 3) × (1 + 1) conveys the number 4. That’s a complicated way to arrive at 4 if all you want is the number.

The old reverse-cut phonetic system solved many problems—like accommodating the translation of the exotic sounds of Sanskrit when Mahayana Buddhism’s scriptures were introduced into China in the late seventh century—but now it had itself become the problem. It required years of rote memorization to learn and was no longer accurate—speech habits had drifted and evolved over time. “Virtue,” for example, is no longer pronounced as “dek” but as “de” in modern-day Chinese. Pronunciation also differed wildly between dialects.

The Chinese spelling system was woefully outdated. At the same time, the Western alphabet was viewed with suspicion in a climate of hostility to foreigners. A middle path had to be found. People like Wang [Zhao] realized there needed to be a system that acted like an alphabet for Chinese without simply using Roman letters.

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 24-25:

While working on his alphabet, Wang [Zhao] never strayed from the beliefs he had shared with the emperor back in 1898: China was losing its power because language was failing its people. Their low literacy and divided dialects impeded China’s ability to govern, negotiate with foreign powers, and keep pace with the outside world. China’s success as a nation and an international power hinged on the single issue of an accessible spoken and written language.

There had been others who shared Wang’s analysis of the problem, although they offered different answers to it. Lu Zhuangzhang, a Chinese Christian from Amoy (now Xiamen), developed the first phonetic system for a Chinese language by a Chinese. His 1892 Simple Script used fifty-five symbols, some of which were adapted from Roman letters to Chinese sound rules, to represent the southern dialect spoken in Amoy. Lu nearly went bankrupt in the process. Lu’s children would bemoan how he squandered the family’s livelihood financing his linguistic experiments.

Among those who followed in Lu’s footsteps was Cai Xiyong, an attaché to a Chinese diplomatic delegation to the United States. He developed his Quick Script for the major southern topolect group of Min, using a rapid writing system—a kind of shorthand—created by David Philip Lindsley. Shorthand, pioneered by Isaac Pitman for the English language in 1837, was a transcription system that used specially simplified notations to record phonemes, words, and phrases in real time.

The real innovator, many later thought, was Shen Xue, a brilliant medical student from Shanghai whose reputedly ingenious scheme, according to eyewitnesses, was originally written in English but has survived only as a preface printed by a Chinese journal. Shen devoted his life to propagating and offering free lessons on his Universal System at a local teahouse. He died a pauper at the tender age of twenty-eight.

Wang stood out from the rest in one important way: while he believed in giving people the power of literacy and the ability to connect with speakers of other dialects, he ultimately wanted to hold them to a single standard—Beijing Mandarin. He saw the critical importance of a unified language, and he was the first to propose Beijing Mandarin as the nation’s standard tongue. It would become the basis of the modern Mandarin, or Putonghua, that the Chinese speak today. For Wang, increasing literacy was only possible if one simultaneously created linguistic unity. To unite China’s hundreds of tongues with a single phonetic scheme would be like deconstructing China’s own Tower of Babel. Before Wang could tackle this problem, however, he had to contend with the native sound system that had been in place for centuries: a way of learning and teaching characters based on sounds called the reverse-cut method.