Subject: Re: History of Bopomofo ?

From: Thomas Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 18:13:43 -0400

It is sometimes forgotten that many of the people who set about to reform
the Chinese language, among other things, studied in Japan and knew the
Japanese language.  Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek,
and Yang Buwei were only a few of many notable such persons.  Many of the
most commonly used vocabularies of the modern Chinese language were actually
borrowed by these and other Chinese from terms that were invented in Japan
by Japanese scholars who knew classical Chinese and modern Western
languages both very well.  For example, "fengjian", used to mean "feudal"
in present usage, is actually a traditional Chinese Confucian value, used
by the Japanese of the Meiji Period to translate (not necessarily with
Marxist implications) the Western word "feudalism".  Since Japanese
society itself was in the 19th century very "feudal" in ways similar to
traditional European society, the Japanese were very much interested in
finding a TRADITIONAL East Asian term to describe a concept that was both
new and also in some ways familiar.  You may also be interested to know
that  the Japanese kana, which apparently inspired the invention of
bo,po,mo,fo, were originally just simplifications of Chinese characters,
used only for their sound, with the graphic meaning being entirely lost.
And of course, some of Chinese phoettic letters (called bo,mo,po, fo) can
be found in Chinese dictionaries with original meanings as true Chinese
characters: e.g. "you4" meaning "again", "yao1" meaning "young", etc.  For
further reading on the subject you might look up books by Yuen Ren CHAO
who participated in the language reform movement of the 1920's or of John
DeFrancis who has written about modern Chinese language reform in the
whole 20th century.

TCB

On Thu, 3 Jun 1993, boon kang wrote:

>    Can anyone give an outline of how the
>    bopomofo scheme was originated ?
>
>    Someone suggested to me that the scheme
>    was the product of Japanese influence.
>    Is this a valid statement ?

---

From: Tianwei Xie <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1993 15:48:26 -0700

>    Is this a valid statement ?

The academic name for Bopomofo is zhuyin zimu. It was not directly
related to Japanese kanas.

Before 1911, at the later stage of Qing dynasty, some scholars believed
that character reform was one of the means to save China. Lu Ganzhang and
others advocated "qieyin zi", Cai Xiyong and others advocated the
stenographic system, while Zhu Wenxiong and others proposed the Romanized
sytem. Lu Ganzhang's "qieyin zi" was classified as a system which was
similar to Japanese kanas to some scholars.

After 1911, Cai Yuanpei, the Minister of Education of the Republic
proposed to adopt "zhuyin zimu" to popularize education. In 1919, a
committee was formed to create a spelling system. After long discussions,
the "zhuyin zimu" was developed and was made public for use in November
1918. All the "zimu" were selected from the ANCIENT CHINESE CHARACTERS
(not the Japanese kanas.) Each syllable has three components. They were
supposed be used to indicate the pronunciation of characters.

Bopomofo zhuyin zimu was the first legal spelling system. It was
recognized by the government and was used by educational institutions for
educational purposes.

Some minor changes were made afterwards.

+-------------------------------+
| Tim Xie                       |
| Dept. of Chinese and Japanese |
| University of California      |
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