Phonetic Alphabet Used for Educating Chinese

Grey River Argus, 30 August 1948, Page 7

Phonetic Alphabet Used for Educating Chinese

(By Frank Long, Reuter’s Correspondent). HONG KONG (By Airmail). The democratisation of China depends on the progress of education and the wiping-out of illiteracy present among China’s teeming millions, according to Prof. K. P. Chan 0.8. E., instructor of Chinese language at the University of Hong Kong. Speaking on “Alphabetised Chinese” at a recent luncheon, Fx’of. Chan urged the introduction of a phonetic script which he has been advocating since 1934 under the “Latinyuo” Movement. He blamed ignorance .as Chinas’ worst enemy in the realisation of democracy, and added that simplification of the Chinese written language was the essential factor in promoting nation-wide education. Estimating that some 370,000,000 people out of China’s population of more than 450,000,000 are illiterate. Prof. Chan epined that it would take a person from 15 to 20 years to master written Chinese. He declared that too much attention has in the past been paid to written Chinese which, in his opinion, has been.driven farther and farther away from the spoken language. Professor Chan said the “Latinyuo” differed in many respects from the * Romanised Kuoyuo in that the former believed in the general flow of a sentence, with the tones taking care of themselves. He stated the first experiment in a simplified phonetic script took place among thousands of Chinese miners in a Siberian mining camp near Vladivostok. Consisting of 28 characters, the “Alphabet” was found workable, and, in 1935, the experiment was tried in various parts of China by Professors who . had also been working on a simplification of the Chinese written language. In 1941, more than 100 families m regions near Tsun Wan, a village along the Kowloon border, were educated in “Alphabetised Chinese” and are now writing letters in the new phonetic script, Prof. Chan said.