Introduction to Pinyin:
China didn't have pinyin letters at that time, so we used the method of orthography or anti-tangent of pinyin Chinese characters. Direct pronunciation means using homophones to express the pronunciation of Chinese characters. If homophones are rare words, they can't be read even if they are pronounced. Backcutting refers to annotating another Chinese character with two Chinese characters. The upper word is the same as the initial consonant of the annotated word, and the lower word is the same as the vowel and tone of the annotated word.
Mr. Zhou Youguang called reverse cutting "center cutting welding method". These two methods of phonetic notation are inconvenient to use. On the basis of analyzing the initial consonants, vowels and tones of Chinese, Wenshou monks in Tang Dynasty formulated 36 letters to describe the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which showed that the phonetic analysis of China had reached a high level at that time. Unfortunately, he used Chinese characters to represent these initials and finals, so such letters did not develop into pinyin characters.
Historical evolution:
1500 years ago, some Muslim minorities in China used "Xiaojing", an Arabic script. Spelling Chinese with Arabic letters is a step further than using Chinese characters to express initials and finals in the Tang Dynasty. * * * has 36 characters, 4 of which are unique. This may be the earliest phonetic symbol used to spell Chinese in China. It no longer bears the trace of Chinese characters, and uses pinyin letters completely.
Dongxiang, Salar and other ethnic groups also use Xiaojing. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, western missionaries came to China to preach. In order to learn Chinese characters, they began to spell Chinese with Latin letters. 1605, Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary (1552- 16 10), published Miracles in Western Languages in Beijing, in which four Chinese characters were phonetic coded in Latin letters.
It's not easy to find the original western language Miracle. It is said that the Vatican Library still has collections. 1626, French Jesuit missionary Giniger published Eyes of Western Confucians in Hangzhou, which is a vocabulary for phonetic notation of Chinese characters with Latin letters. The scheme used in phonetic notation is modified on the basis of Matteo Ricci's scheme. Matteo Ricci and Giniger's scheme is designed on the basis of "Putonghua Pronunciation", which is suitable for spelling Beijing pronunciation.
From 18 15 to 1823, Ma Lixun, a British missionary who preached in Guangzhou, compiled a Chinese dictionary, which is the earliest Chinese-English dictionary. In the dictionary, he spelled out China Cantonese dialect with his own pinyin scheme, which is actually a dialect that teaches Roman characters. Then in other dialect areas, different dialects are designed to teach Roman characters.
Among them, the "Zhuyinzi" in Xiamen began to spread at 1850, and only at 192 1, 50,000 copies were printed and sold. Until the founding of New China, about100000 people used this dialect to teach Roman characters. Dialects in other places teach Roman characters, which are circulated in southern trading ports and are mainly used for missionary work.