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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

For the unfamiliar, "ㄨㄛˇㄉㄜ˙ㄇㄧˋㄇㄚˇ" is an example of "bopomofo" script, the phonetic system used to teach kids reading and pronunciation in Taiwan, and adapted to Chinese keyboard input (zhuyin). I learned it in the 1990s studying Mandarin in Taipei. It maps closely to pinyin romanization used in China (i.e., "ㄨㄛˇ" = "wo3" which is the sound in the Mandarin dialect for "我" and potentially other characters with the same pronunciation and tone. "我" means "I" or "me").

I am wondering if it was modeled after Hiragana/Katakana during Taiwan's colonial period?

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Zhuyin is indeed inspired/influenced by hiragana/katakana

https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%B3%A8%E9%9F%B3%E7%AC%A6%E8...

But it wasn’t created by/for Taiwanese specifically, by that time Taiwan was under Japan’s rule and they were learning Japanese at the schools. Indeed it was imported back into Taiwan when KMT fled there.

PRC then went on its own jounery of inventing its own Romanization scheme for Chinese. They once almost chose Cyrillic alphabet because its ideological alliance with Soviets, but Latin script still won at the end of day, because the scholars were convicned it is more widely used and more useful.

Repulic Of China used to be the government of China duing 1912 to 1949 before moved to Taiwan. It was invented early time of that government. Long time ago in mainland the period was called "before liberation". I had some "before liberation" books with the scripts which was very interesting but seems to be never used in Mainland China after "liberation" as I know.

Actually, Zhuyin was used for a number of years before the Latin Pinyin scheme was finalized in 1958, after which it remained as an alternative for people less familiar with the Latin alphabet. Dictionary and reference books[0] published in the mainland used to include Zhuyin well into the 1980s. The characters used for Zhuyin were actually retained in the earliest simplified Chinese character sets (GB 2312-80) for computer typesetting, however by then very few people are still using them over Pinyin. And indeed it gradually faded from public knowledge from there.

[0]:http://img1.gtimg.com/news/pics/hv1/74/203/2056/133743239.pn...

I thought hiragana/katakana come from Chinese character radicals?

Well, yeah they did, but thousands of years before bopomofo script.

Hiragana is at most ~1500 years old.

Many cultures that borrowed Chinese characters developed their own ways of simplifying them. Moreover, Chinese characters themselves are composed of distinct radicals, so it's rather natural to try to decompose them when needed. The radicals are ancient, but they can look very similar to kana in their simple forms. This could be an example of parallel evolution, not one borrowing exclusively from another.

Yes but they still use the radicals in the Chinese characters themselves, so it's odd to say it comes from Katakana/Hiragana.

It does have some resemblance to katakana. The first character at least looks very similar to メ.

It comes from China, was developed in the republican era. It's based on a shorthand modification of seal script - though Japan was very influential on the elite of China at that time so it's possible Katakana played some role.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script

Most katakana were derived from Chinese characters by taking a part of that character (whereas Hiragana are simplified cursive forms of a whole Chinese character). The メ part is part of many Chinese characters.

Bopomofo has nothing to do with Taiwan, specifically.

It's a system introduced by the Republic of China, and tha continues to be used in the Republic of China (only Taiwan left these days).

That's because the mainland switched to Pinyin in the 50s.

That being said, Taiwan has now also officially switched to Pinyin so use may increase.

Edit:

Another interesting, and old, system to write Mandarin using the Arabic alphabet: Xiao'erjing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing

Edit 2:

Bopomofo is in the same line as Hiragana/Katakana/Korean system: It simplifies and make things phonetic but still creates a brand new characters set inspired by Chinese characters.

With Pinyin, to me the main development was to integrate that there was already an ubiquitous alphabet in existence, the latin alphabet, that could be used and save the trouble of yet another writing system.

A bit like what happened in Vietnam (though obviously that's because a Frenchman came up with the system).

For what it's worth, there is also a Sinitic language fairly close to Mandarin that's written in Cyrillic characters, Dungan (which, incidentally, sort of refutes the notion that one can only write Chinese languages with Chinese characters).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4578

As a resident here, I know for a fact that Taiwan did not replace bopomofo with pinyin.

You see bopomofu is to denote pronunciation not to romanticize characters. If you are talking about how location/street names are spelled, some form of pinyin (literally means spelling) had always been used for romanticization.

Bopomofo is still taught in taiwan and zhuyin is still used for typing. The only thing changed is signs now use pinyin....

It's a start...

Well they don't change the signs in Tainan or Taipei, only exists in 1 or 2 county's.

Hopefully they don't switch to pinyin, and I especially hope they don't switch to Simplified.

It had always been some form of romanticization for street names. Pronunciation has always been bopomofo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

Wikipedia says it was created under the Beiyang Government so no. Also bopomofo is an alphabet (seperate characters for consonants and vowels) where as katakana/hiragana are syllabaries

However all three systems are derived from regular Chinese script. Hiragana is derived from cursive Chinese script, Katakana from radicals used as shorthand for certain characters, and Bopomofo from archaic forms of modern characters.

It's not an alphabet, it's a semi-syllabary (and that's written on the page you linked). There is no separate characters for consonants and vowels but instead a separation between consonants and rhymes. Rhymes can be made of one or multiples vowels, and can be terminated by a consonant (/n/, /ŋ/).

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