Home > Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation

1 History

It was decided in a draft on August 7, 1912, a month after a conference led by the Cai Yuanpei in July 10, that a set of phonetic symbols were to be used for education purposes. The Commission was set up in December, led by Woo Tsin-hang. The Commission ended on May 22, 1913. A later similar organization that still exists, also headed by Woo Tsin-hang for a while, is the Mandarin Promotion Council.

2 Members

The first meeting took place on February 15, 1913 in Beijing, with 44 delegates. The chairman was Woo; vice-chairman Wang Zhao (王照). There were two representatives per each of the 26 provinces. The TibetThis article is on Historic Tibet. Tibet" can also refer to the Tibet Autonomous Region. Tibet ( Tibetan : , (Bod) pronounced Po, Chinese: , pinyin: Xizang) is a region of Central Asia and the home of the Tibetan people. With an average elevation of 4,900ans, the MongoliaAlternative meaning: Mongolia (region Mongolia ( Khalkha Mongolian: is a landlocked country in Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and the People's Republic of China to the south. After the conquest of China by the Mongol Empire, much of Mongolia was runs and the overseas ChineseOverseas Chinese ( in pinyin: huaqiao, or huabo, or qiaobo) are ethnic Chinese who live outside of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan. There are approximately 60 million overseas Chinese mostly living in southeast Asia where they make up a majori each had one representative. Prominent members included:

• Cai Zhang (蔡璋)
• Chen Suiyi (陳遂意)
• Gao Kunnan (高鯤南)
• Hu Yuren (胡雨人)
• Li Liangcai (李良材)
• Liu Zishan (劉繼善)
• Lu Zhuanzhang (盧戇章)
• Ma Tigan (馬體乾)
• Wang Rongbao (汪榮寶)
• Wang Sui (王崔)
• Wang Yi'an (汪怡安)
• Xing Dao (邢島)
• Yang Qu (楊麴)
• Yang Zenghao (楊曾浩)

3 Phonetic symbols

There were three main ideas of how the phonetic symbols should be:

• Using certain complete Chinese characters to symbolize other characters of the same sound
  • Supporters included Wang Zhao, Wang Rongbao, Wang Yi'an, and Cai.
• Using Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet also called the Roman alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. letters
  • Supporters included Yang Zenghao and Liu
• Using non-existent symbols
  • Supporters included Woo, Lu, Ma, Li, Xing, Wang Sui, Hu, Yang Qu, Gao, Chen, and Zheng.

The three groups discussed for two months and adopted 15 symbols from Zhang Binglin's all- Zhuanshu Ziyin Zimu (記音字母), which was the proposal by the Zhejiang Committee. Ziyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao.

After its proclamation, several aspects of Zhuyin were further modified, including:

• Rearranging the order of the symbols
• Adding ㄜ (Pinyin e)
• ㄦ, originally just r, was now also er (a retroflex vowel)
• The three dialectal symbols -- 万 (v), 广 (gn), and 兀 (ng) -- were deleted
• The tone system was modified