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A recent study on Chinese writing and literacy concluded, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks." [ 29 ] As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese , it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary Chinese , the standard ...
[1] The dominant international standard for Standard Mandarin since about 1982 has been Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s. Other well-known systems include Wade–Giles (Beijing Mandarin) and Yale romanization (Beijing Mandarin and Cantonese).
Zhou Youguang (Chinese: 周有光; pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng; 13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017), also known as Chou Yu-kuang or Chou Yao-ping, was a Chinese economist, linguist, sinologist, and supercentenarian.
The Chinese name for firecrackers, baozhu, literally means "exploding bamboo". [203] After the invention of gunpowder, gunpowder firecrackers had a shape that resembled bamboo and produced a similar sound, so the name "exploding bamboo" was retained. [204] In traditional Chinese culture, firecrackers were used to scare off evil spirits. [204]
In school books that teach Chinese, the pinyin romanization is often shown below a picture of the thing the word represents, with the Chinese character alongside. The second-most common romanization system, the Wade–Giles , was invented by Thomas Wade in 1859 and modified by Herbert Giles in 1892.
One of the early attempts was an electro-mechanical Chinese typewriter Ming kwai (Chinese: 明快; pinyin: míngkuài; Wade–Giles: ming-k'uai) 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.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
The Hanyu Pinyin (or simply 'pinyin') alphabet had been developed, but plans to replace Chinese characters with it were deferred, and the idea is no longer actively pursued. This change in priorities may have been due in part to pinyin's design being specific to Mandarin, to the exclusion of other dialects.