Why pinyin was invented

Over the years, Hanyu Pinyin has gradually replaced older romanization systems used in the west, and pinyin is now the standard for learning Mandarin Chinese, even in Taiwan, which resisted the adoption of the mainland's Hanyu Pinyin for a long time. A1 pronunciation points. For more information on how to legally use this content, please see our Creative Commons license unless otherwise noted.

View View source History. Category : Pinyin. Primary 1 pupils here spend their first term about three months learning the mechanics of hanyu pinyin before learning how to write Chinese characters.

This change was made in to accommodate the larger number of pupils who had little or no exposure to the language before starting school. Join ST's Telegram channel here and get the latest breaking news delivered to you. We have been experiencing some problems with subscriber log-ins and apologise for the inconvenience caused. Until we resolve the issues, subscribers need not log in to access ST Digital articles. But a log-in is still required for our PDFs. Skip to main content. Chew Hui Min.

Share gift link below with your friends and family. He said ordinary people no longer believed in the Communist Party, and that the vast majority of Chinese intellectuals were in favour of democracy.

The man who helped 'simplify' Chinese. Chinese paper's sweary New Year puzzle. The words that ruled the Chinese internet in When Chinese children forget how to write. Image source, Getty Images. Zhou Youguang was born in during the Qing Dynasty. It was only in the s, in the aftermath of the Russian imperial reforms of and the Young Turk Revolution of , that the Latin alphabet emerged as a serious contender to other script proposals.

The Bolshevik Revolution in and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Great War in strengthened the position of the Latin alphabet even further, as many reformers saw it as the embodiment of material and mental progress during national reconstruction. Amid incessant debates in the post-imperial Russian and Ottoman space, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan was the first to officially Latinize its Arabic script in The modernist values of efficiency, productivity, and progress that the Latin alphabet supposedly embodied turned out to be critical for the Bolsheviks, who promised a new socialist civilization based on the same principles.

Indeed, during the s, socialist thinkers in the USSR were preoccupied with the so-called Scientific Organization of Labor [ nauchnaia organizatsiia truda ], an industrialist creed imported to the Soviet Union by Aleksei Gastev An aficionado of American Taylorism, Gastev established dozens of institutes and utilized cutting-edge technologies to optimize bodily movements and increase labor productivity.

His philosophy of efficiency extended into the realm of language and writing as well, which he claimed could also be measured and optimized in order to achieve ultimate mental productivity. The Latinization Movement in Azerbaijan was coming to fruition in the midst of these debates. The Latin alphabet seemed to offer the remedy that the socialists were searching for all along——in fact, many claimed that even the Cyrillic alphabet could be Latinized for an internationalist socialist civilization!

While the Latinization of the Cyrillic alphabet never took place, the revolutionary fervor reached a peak in with the First Turcology Congress in Baku, where more than a hundred participants representing various nationalities discussed the future of the alphabet in the world.