Alphabets in the History of the Chinese Language

Abstract

Various phonographic variants of script, both for Chinese and for the neighboring languages using Chinese characters, had been created long before contacts with the West and the appearance of any Romanization systems in the region. Two official alphabets, the ʼPhags-pa and the Yìsītìfēi (Istīfā) scripts, and likely the nonofficial Arabographic Xi ˇа ojī ng writing system were introduced for the Chinese language already in the period of the Mongol Yuan dynasty. A syllabic character-based ‘women’s script’ Nǚshū was invented for the Southern Hunan Tǔhuà dialects at the turn of the Ming period or evidently much earlier. Modern information technologies and the possibilities of computer typesetting, in particular, have inevitably changed even the official character texts written in Standard Chinese. To a greater extent, these changes are known to have affected the language of the computer-mediated communication with its often unusual forms of Latin spelling for Chinese words. In many cases, however, Chinese Internet users and primarily speakers of various dialects prefer to use even for the all-China lexicon not only Latin variants, but also phonetically borrowed characters. Thus, they follow the centuries-old traditions of nonofficial texts including those in the medieval Báihuà vernacular language with its numerous phonetically or semantically borrowed characters from official Literary Chinese.