History of the Chinese Language - Page 5

Written Chinese (Continued)

Shi Huangdi, first emperor of a unified China, suppressed many regional scripts and enforced a simplified, standardized writing called the Small Seal. In the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) this developed into the Clerical, Running, Draft, and Regular or Standard scripts. Printed Chinese is modeled on the Standard Script. Cursive or Running or rapid writing (the Running and Draft scripts) introduced many abbreviated characters used in artistic calligraphy and in commercial and private correspondence, but it was long banned from official documents.

There have been four broadly defined styles of writing in the last 3000 Years:
1. Seal scripts,
2. Regular Brush scripts,
3. Running script,
4. "Grass" script.

The printing of abbreviated characters is still forbidden in Taiwan but has become the normal practice in the People's Republic of China. The non-abbreviated characters is referred to as the "traditional" characters. Many of the old people in the People's Republic of China still use the traditional characters and some have trouble with the abbreviated characters. The abbreviated characters is sometimes referred to as the "simplified" characters.

Methods of Transliteration

In the English-speaking world, since 1892, Chinese words (except personal and place-names) have usually been transliterated according to a phonetic spelling system called Wade-Giles romanization, propounded by Sir Thomas Wade (1818-95) and Herbert Giles (1845-1935). Personal names were romanized according to individual wishes, however, and place-names followed the nonsystematic spellings of the Chinese Post Office. Since 1958 another phonetic romanization known as Pinyin ("spelling") has had official standing in the People's Republic of China, where it is used for telegrams and in primary education. Replacement of the traditional characters by Pinyin has been advocated but is unlikely to be carried through completely because of the threat it poses to literature and historical documentation in the classical language. Simplification of the sound system through time, with the resultant homonyms, has made the terse classical style unintelligible when transcribed in an alphabetic script. Since Jan. 1, 1979, Xinhua (New China News Agency) has used Pinyin in all dispatches to foreign countries. The U. S. government, many scholarly publications, and newspapers such as the New York Times have also adopted the Pinyin system, as has the Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia.