Resumen de Toward a phonographic writing System of Chinese: a case study in writing reform

Ping Chen

• This article is devoted to a systematic study of the efforts to design and promote a phonographic writing System of Chinese. The undertaking is mainly motivated by the claim that the traditional logographic writing System is difficult to learn and inconvenient to use. Phonetic schemes that have been proposed differ with regard to the intended functions, the form of script, the dialectal base, and the phonological representation of the syllabic structure. Various linguistic and sociopolitical factors have interacted in a complicated way in the determination of the success or failure of the schemes.