Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Gwoyeu Romatzyh (pinyin: Gúo yǔ lúo mǎ zì, literally "National Language Romanization"), abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren) and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR. In addition a small number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong and overseas from 1942 to 2000.

GR is the better known of the two romanization systems which indicate the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables ("tonal spelling"). These tones are a fundamental part of the Chinese language: to a Chinese speaker they are no less a component of a word than vowels are to an English speaker. Tones in Chinese allow speakers to discriminate between otherwise identical syllables—in other words they are phonemic. Other systems indicate the tones with either diacritics (for example Pinyin: āi, ái, ǎi and ài) or numbers (Wade-Giles: ai1, ai2, etc.). GR spells the same four tones ai, air, ae and ay. These spellings, which follow specific rules, indicate the tones while retaining the pronunciation of the syllable ai.

Chao claimed that, because GR embeds the tone of each syllable in its spelling, it may help students to master Chinese tones. One study however, found the opposite to be true in a study of GR. GR uses a complicated system of tonal spelling that obscures the basic relationship between spelling and tone; for example, the difference between tones 1 and 2 is variously indicated as mha vs. ma, ching vs. chyng, chang vs. charng, etc. Although tonal spelling has been adopted as part of the normal romanization of a number of Asian languages (e.g. Hmong), all such systems indicate different tones in a simple and consistent fashion by adding letters to the end of a syllable (e.g. in Hmong, -b indicates high tone, -s indicates low tone, -j indicates high-falling tone, etc.). The complexity of GR's tonal spelling led to public hostility.

In 1928 China adopted GR as the nation's official romanization system. GR was used to indicate pronunciations in dictionaries of the National (Mandarin-based) Language. Its proponents hoped one day to establish it as a writing system for a reformed Chinese script. But despite support from a small number of trained linguists in China and overseas, GR met with public indifference and even hostility due to its complexity. Another obstacle preventing its widespread adoption was its narrow basis on the Beijing dialect, in a period lacking a strong centralized government to enforce its use. Eventually GR lost ground to Pinyin and other later romanization systems. However, its influence is still evident, as several of the principles introduced by its creators have been used in romanization systems that followed it. Its pattern of tone spelling remains in the standard spelling of the Chinese province of Shaanxi (shǎnxī), which cannot be distinguished from Shanxi (shānxī) when written in pinyin without diacritics.