moon_custafer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moon_custafer) wrote2020-02-20 04:21 pm
moon_custafer) wrote2020-02-20 04:21 pm
Live-bloggng an article on 20th-century attempts to unify Chinese in both script and pronunciation:
Description of a conference of linguists in post-1911-Revolution (1913) China, trying to come up with a scheme of phonetic characters and also a unified pronunciation scheme for the whole country. Which went about as well as you’d expect.
Sounds like at one point there was an attempt at gerrymandering Mandarin, which is not a pair of words I usually get to use together.
(Googles Yüan Shih-k`ai) Whoah. OK, you never really hear about that period.
(Reads further down, gets to the ‘teens and early ‘twenties) I should have known somebody would suggest Esperanto sooner or later.
(Even further) Oh good, here comes Y. R. Chao, the reason I looked this up in the first place.
(1930s) “Many supporters looked not to themselves but to a strong man to force the reform of the script, as had happened in the case of Turkey. "If China had a Kemal Pasha," said a Western admirer of the National Language Romanization, "we should probably see this system replace the characters in daily life."”
Uh....
Sounds like at one point there was an attempt at gerrymandering Mandarin, which is not a pair of words I usually get to use together.
(Googles Yüan Shih-k`ai) Whoah. OK, you never really hear about that period.
(Reads further down, gets to the ‘teens and early ‘twenties) I should have known somebody would suggest Esperanto sooner or later.
(Even further) Oh good, here comes Y. R. Chao, the reason I looked this up in the first place.
(1930s) “Many supporters looked not to themselves but to a strong man to force the reform of the script, as had happened in the case of Turkey. "If China had a Kemal Pasha," said a Western admirer of the National Language Romanization, "we should probably see this system replace the characters in daily life."”
Uh....