What Efforts Have Been Made To Reform The Chinese Language?

Because the Chinese is such a difficult language to learn, especially for foreigners, in modern times efforts have been repeatedly made to simplify it by various methods. Some advocate simplifying the characters, as Communist China has done, so that they can be learned more easily. However, such effort is not at all favoured by the Nationalist government in Taiwan, nor by the more conservative-minded and older Chinese. Others have tried romanization, replacing the characters with romanized letters. The first ones to do this were the Catholic missionaries who came to China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 C.E.). But the literature they wrote in romanized letters was used only by the missionaries themselves. In the nineteenth century, missionaries of Christendom translated the Bible into a number of dialects, such as the Soochow, Shanghai, Ningpo, Amoy and Cantonese dialects, in romanized letters. In 1867, the English scholar T. F. Wade published his own system of romanization, which has been widely used by writers of Chinese textbooks and dictionaries.

Then in 1918 the Chinese government published a set of forty phonetic symbols to help readers to pronounce the characters correctly. These are printed alongside the characters instead of replacing the latter. This phonetic system is used simply as an aid to pronunciation and is not meant to take the place of  characters.

In 1934 a Latinized Chinese alphabet was published. It was a rather simple system without any attempt to indicate the particular tones of the words. As a result, it could easily cause confusion and did not prove to be very popular with the people. It has since gone into complete oblivion. Attempts have also been made by Communist China to Latinize the Chinese language, but the matter is still very much in the experimental stage.