Gwoyeu Romatzyh - Use in Published Texts

Use in Published Texts

Chao used GR in four influential works:

• A Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (in collaboration with Lien Sheng Yang) (1947)
• Mandarin Primer (1948)

This course was originally used in the Army Specialized Training Program at the Harvard School for Overseas Administration in 1943–1944 and subsequently in civilian courses.

• A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968a)
• Readings in Sayable Chinese (1968b) "Sayable" in this context means colloquial, as opposed to the vernacular Chinese (bairhuah, Pinyin báihuà) style often read by students.

Readings in Sayable Chinese was written "to supply the advanced student of spoken Chinese with reading matter which he can actually use in his speech." It consists of three volumes of Chinese text with facing GR romanization. They contain some lively recorded dialogues, "Fragments of an autobiography," two plays and a translation of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (Tzoou daw Jinqtz lii). Two extracts from Tzoou daw Jinqtz lii with facing translations can be read online.

In 1942 Walter Simon introduced GR to English-speaking sinologists in a special pamphlet, The New Official Chinese Latin Script. Over the remainder of the 1940s he published a series of textbooks and readers, as well as a Chinese-English Dictionary, all using GR. His son Harry Simon later went on to use GR in scholarly papers on Chinese linguistics.

In 1960 Y.C. Liu, a colleague of Walter Simon's at SOAS, published Fifty Chinese Stories. These selections from classical texts were presented in both classical and modern Chinese, together with GR romanizations and romanized Japanese versions prepared by Simon (by that time Professor Emeritus of Chinese in the University of London).

Lin Yutang's Chinese-English dictionary (1972) incorporated a number of innovative features, one of which was a simplified version of GR. Lin eliminated most of the spelling rules requiring substitution of vowels, as can be seen from his spelling Guoryuu Romatzyh, in which the regular -r is used for T2 and a doubled vowel for T3.

The first 3 issues of the Shin Tarng magazine (which would be Xin Tang in Pinyin; published in 1982-1989) used a Simplifier Romanisation (簡化羅馬字 Jiannhuah Rormaatzyh) based on Gwoyeu Romatzyh; the fourth edition, entitled Xin Talng, used Pinyin with Gwoyeu Romatzyh-like tone marking.