The Romanization Debate
Résumé
Pinyin means "to assemble a word according to its sound". Outside China, it is synonymous with the new transcription system for Chinese ideographic writing that is becoming increasingly popular. In China, pinyin is also used as the abbreviation for the official title of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Scheme: Hanyu Pinyin Fangan, which the National People's Congress adopted in February 1958. Pinyin was based on the Latinxua Sinwenz system (Ladinghua Xinwenzi or New Latinized Writing) devised during the period 1929-1931 by a group of Chinese and Soviet linguists, Qu Qiubai being a prominent member among them. These linguists chose the Latin alphabet as the source alphabet for the proposed separate transcriptions of all the languages of the Sinitic family.' The Latinxua Sinwenz system, itself, was originally designed to tackle the problem of illiteracy for ethnic Chinese living inside the Russian border. In this case, the Gansu-Shaanxi dialect of Northern Chinese spoken by the Dungans was romanized,2 so that when the Beijing dialect was selected as the standard pronunciation of putonghua - "the common language" - in 1955, several major modifications were necessary in the formulation of the pinyin system.