Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 213, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1912 — MAKE-UP OF NEW ALPHABET [ARTICLE]

MAKE-UP OF NEW ALPHABET

Chinese 8ohol«re Devise List of Forty-: Two Letters Drawn From Different Languages. Reform Is in the air In China. The young Chlnse, educated in the unlver-. skies of America or Europe, are? no longer content with the characters in which their language has been written for thousands of years, each character ‘ representing an idea—not a word—and there being about 80,000 of these. They are trying now to abolish these characters and to replace them with letters that will represent sounds. No other single language could offer them a suitable alphabet, for there are sounds In their tongue which exist In no other. Chow Hi Chu, secretary of the Chinese legation in Rome, has been devoting his time recently to malting up an alphabet suitable for Chinese. He has been assisted by Messrs Wan and Chou, sub-secretaries, and Signor Rlvetta dl Solonghello, professor of Japanese and Chinese at the Oriental Institute of Naples, one of the greatest polyglots In the world. The latter gives this description of the alphabet that has resulted from their labors: “ r~' “To represent exactly all the sounds of the Chinese language.” said he, “we have had to draw upon almost all existing alphabets. The alphabet we have composed consists of 42 characters, of which 23 and vowels and 19 are consonants. ' — r “Of the vowels, four are taken from the Greek, four from the Russian, five from the Latin, one from the Chinese; of the nine otherß, two are what we call ‘modified’ or ‘prolonged’ and seven are reversed. “Of the consonants, 14 are taken from the Latin, three from the Russian and two from the Greek.” With thesel letters it Is possible to write exactly all the words of the spoken Chinese language that Is understood from one end of the new republic to the other.