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 alphabet 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 Jiyin Zimu (記音字母), which was the proposal by the Zhejiang Committee. Jiyin 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, but are still to be found in Unicode Bopomofo (U+3105..U+312c).
- The tone system was modified
Read more about this topic: Commission On The Unification Of Pronunciation
Famous quotes containing the words phonetic and/or symbols:
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)