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
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