I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically.
The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at)
Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles
the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters that matched the syllables of Japanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana
It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
"Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."
"Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.
For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R.
My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin
The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think.
I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.
This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.
If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write:
A) Churchill
B) 丘吉尔
But they will never write:
C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B)
I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).
Earlier, e.g. in the books written a few hundred years ago, hiragana was used like today, i.e. inlined with kanji, for writing verb and adjective terminations or various grammatical particles, but katakana was used as furigana, for showing the pronunciation of the more seldom used or ambiguous kanji, especially when the Chinese reading was used for those kanji.
The use of katakana for the writing of foreign words has developed from its use for writing the approximate pronunciation of Chinese words.
The writing reform enforced after WWII has introduced significant changes in the use of hiragana and in the correspondences between kanji and hiragana (and also many kanji have been substituted with simplified variants), so reading a pre-war book can be challenging for someone familiar only with modern Japanese.
Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language.
The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning.
For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as:
Mandarin: Bǎoluó
Cantonese: bou2 lo4
Hakka: Pó-lò
Hokkien: Pó-lô
Teochew: bao2 lo5
Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
Search "borrowing" in this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.
The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:
1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái
This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').
2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó
This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation."
But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).