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Zhùyin Fúhào (注音符號), or "Symbols for Annotating Sounds", often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) for the first four syllables of these Chinese phonetic symbols, is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (based on Taiwan) for teaching the Chinese languages, especially Mandarin to illiterate Mandarin-speaking children (See Uses ). The system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 vowels. There is a one symbol-one sound correspondence.
The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Woo Tsin-hang from 1912 to 13, created a system called Guoyin Zimu (國音字母 "National Pronunciation Letters") or Zhuyin Zimu (註音字母 or 注音字母 "Sound-annotating Letters") which is based on Zhang Binglin's shorthands. (For differences with the Zhang system, see Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation#Phonetic symbols.) A draft was released on July 11, 1913 by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education, but it was not officially proclaimed until November 23, 1918. Zhuyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao in April 19301930 is the common year starting on Wednesday. see link for calendar) Events January-February January 6 The first diesel-engine automobile trip is completed ( Indianapolis, Indiana, to New York City). January 27 Miguel Primo de Rivera resigns January 30 G.
The ROC Education Ministry has attempted for many years to phase out the use of Zhuyin in favor of a system based on Roman characters (see MPS II). However, this transition has been extremely slow due to the difficulty in teaching elementary school teachers a new Roman-based system.
There was no official document explaining the details of the origins of the characters, but they are apparent if you understand some basic Chinese characters. The zhuyin symbols are mainly fragments of characters that contain the sound that each symbol represents. For example:
A few were made by adding additional strokes, for example:
A few are virtually identical to Chinese characters still in use, for example:
Many are nearly entirely identical to radicalA radical (from Latin radix meaning "root") is a basic identifiable component of every Chinese character, namely, of the Chinese Hanzi, the Japanese Kanji, and the Korean Hanja. The name is an English translation of the characters (bu shu in Chinese; bushs with the same sounds, for example:
Other symbols, mostly vowel symbols, are based entirely or partly on obsolete variants of characters, for example:
There are still others that are totally unlike any known symbols, but were designed to look like, and be written in the same style as, Chinese chacacters. The zhuyin characters usually are represented in typographic fontsIn typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. There are also typefaces of Ideograms and symbols (e. mathematical or map making) In it as if drawn with an ink brush (as in Regular ScriptThe Regular Script or in Chinese Kaishu ( Pinyin: kishu) and Japanese Kaisho also commonly known as Standard Regular , is the newest of the Chinese calligraphy style (peaked at the 7th century), hence most common in modern writings and publications (after).