User:Remsense/Lu Zhuangzhang

Lu Zhuangzhang (1854 – 28 December 1928) was a Chinese language reformer during the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and early Republic of China (1912–1949), known as being first Chinese scholar to develop a romanization system for Chinese—which he called Qieyin xinzi and on which he first published in 1892. Lu's work stimulated autochthonous Chinese interest in script reform. Qieyin xinzi, which was inspired by Christian mercenaries working in China at the time, has been identified as the beginning of the script reform movement in China—spurring a question that would remain important in China well into the second half of the 20th century.

Early life
Lu was born in Fujian, situated on the country's southeastern coast, and raised in Xiamen, where Christian missionaries had introduced a system of romanization for the local prestige variety of Chinese that had become widely used in newspapers and books. When Lu was 18, he converted to Christianity after failing the imperial civil service examination, and subsequently sought out opportunities among the missionary community. In 1875 a 21-year-old Lu moved to Singapore, where he studied English. He returned to Xiamen in 1879, where he worked as a language tutor and a translator for both Chinese people and foreigners. John MacGowan of the London Missionary Society then recruited Lu to help compile the 1883 English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect, which used a romanization system invented by Carstairs Douglas in 1876.

While assisting MacGowan, Lu worked extensively with the missionaries' system of that used letters from the Latin alphabet to transcribe local varieties of Chinese; he moreover came to believe that he could develop a better system. The speech-sound script required several letters to convey a pronunciation, making some word spellings longer than others. Lu devised a streamlined system of 55 assigned to Chinese phonemes. Zimu were largely graphically derived from letters in the Latin alphabet. Lu drew from the traditional Chinese fanqie system, where pronunciation was notated via pairs of other characters phonetically approximating to syllable's the initial and final sounds. Lu's system also operated with this model, with each syllable spelled with two zimu.

What would become the Qieyin xinzi was designed for use with Southern Min languages, only one sub-grouping of Chinese varieties: specifically, Lu targeted the Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou dialects, though he stated that the script's adaptation for the other languages of China was viable. He believed his system was easy to learn, and claimed that a student could pick it up in a few weeks. However, when he tried teaching it to his family members, few could master the complex spelling rules, principles, and exceptions. The historical linguist Luo Changpei found Lu's scheme cumbersome and esoteric, and "neither Chinese nor Western."

The Qieyin xinzi
After two decades of work on developing his New Phonetic Alphabet, Lu's Yimu liaoran chujie: Zhongguo qie yin xin zi Xia qiang ( First Steps in Being Able to Understand at a Glance: Chinese new phonetic script in the Amoy topolect) was published in 1892. The sinologist Victor H. Mair called it "the first book written by a Chinese which presented a potentially workable system of spelling for a Sinitic language", and says Lu is now viewed as the "father of script reform". Among other improvements, Lu's Chinese romanization system links up syllables into words and separates them with spaces.

Lu's 1892 preface to the Yimu liaoran chujie explains the pragmatic advantages of the New Phonetic Alphabet: "Chinese characters are perhaps the most difficult of all characters in the whole world today…. Normally, when one writes poems and essays, one uses only a little over 5,000 of these characters. But if he wants to recognize these several thousand characters, even the most intelligent person will have to spend more than ten years of hard work. Herein lies the suitability of spelling. In my humble opinion, the wealth and strength of a nation are based on science; the advancement of science is based on the desire for learning and understanding principle of all men and women, young and old. Their being able to desire learning and understand principle is based on the spelling of words. Once they have become familiar with the letters and the methods of spelling, they can read any word by themselves without a teacher. Because the written and spoken word are the same, when they read with their mouths they comprehend in their hearts. Furthermore, because the strokes of the letters are simple, they are easy to recognize and easy to write, saving more than ten years of a person's life. This time may be dedicated to mathematics, physics, chemistry, and all kinds of practical learning. What worry would there then be for the wealth and strength of the nation? In the whole world today, except for China, all the other nations mostly use 20 or 30 letters for spelling.... Therefore, in the civilized nations of Europe and America, all men and women over the age of ten, even in remote villages and isolated areas, are able to read.... What is the reason for this? It is because they spell their words, because the written and the spoken word are the same, and because the strokes of the letters are simple... That men and women of foreign nations all can read is due to spelling."

Lu's work opened the floodgates for new systems of transliteration for Chinese, and inspired others to develop 29 phonetic schemes between 1892 and 1910. When Lu later supervised a language school in colonial Taiwan, he realized the flaws with his Qieyin Xinzi and attempted to redesign the system on the basis of the Japanese kana syllabary, but there were already too many competing schemes.

Lu Zhuangzhang continued to work on reforming written Chinese, and in 1912 he was appointed as one of 55 members in the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, which developed Zhang Binglin's Jiyin zimu into the bopomofo syllabary system, which was adopted by the Republican Beiyang government in 1918.

The linguist, sinologist, and lexicographer John DeFrancis dedicated his ABC Chinese-English Dictionary to Lu Zhuangzhang and five other advocates for Chinese script reform, and described him as the "Pioneer reformer whose publication in 1892 of alphabetic schemes for several varieties of Chinese marked the beginning of Chinese interest in reform of the writing system"