<p>Considering Chinese as Hieroglyphics or Logogram. This language has it own granularity as basic element.</p>

<h2>A - 1</h2>

<p>Yes, we did have some mechanism / program the same with Pinyin </p>

<blockquote>
  <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie" rel="nofollow">FanQie</a> as the most popular one</p>
</blockquote>

<p>and thinking of Taiwan, the Pinyin is not actually very popular there, they have another set of <em>thing</em></p>

<blockquote>
  <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_romanization_in_Taiwan" rel="nofollow">Taiwan Pinyin</a></p>
</blockquote>

<h2>A - 2</h2>

<p>Also considering what I said, Chinese as Hieroglyphics, this language characters apply the shape of things.</p>

<p>Like anything in the world, things came out very complex firstly, and then when people get good at it, they know how to reduce the complexity.</p>

<p>For the Simplified Chinese in 1970s, it was aiming at popularizing the education, and eradicating illiteracy by making the character easier to learn to the general folks.</p>

<h3>P.S</h3>

<p>I'm not a linguist at all, I just explained something that I knew and from my point of view. Hope these would help.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T13:00:01.190Z
I think the Taiwan pinyin is known as bpmf, correct me if I am wrong.
Itakura
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T13:04:16.380Z
@KennyGuy, Hi, if you meant __BoPoMoFo__ by __bpmf__, it is for Mandarin Chinese I think, check out this [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo)
cinqS
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T17:29:52.740Z
Is fanqie still used at all?
Featherball
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T18:12:47.727Z
@DanielCann, No, not at all, I mean, Maybe some professors are studying on that... but from what I see, no one is using that. It's complex, painful when using it
cinqS
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-30T09:22:24.750Z
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9F%BB%E6%9B%B8
mootmoot
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-12-01T08:34:52.297Z
Taiwan used to use 通用拼音 tongyong pinyin, but since 2008, the ROC government has actually standardized on hanyu pinyin.
Brian Tung
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-12-07T06:14:55.940Z
@BrianTung, did you mean RC (Republic of China) by ROC? and thanks for the information about general pinyin.
cinqS
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-12-07T08:12:08.503Z
@cinqS: Yes.  I've never seen that abbreviated as RC, only as ROC.
Brian Tung
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-12-09T00:33:04.690Z
@BrianTung, sure, you are right. I double checked. it's ROC for Republic Of China. Thanks.
cinqS
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T12:10:26.467Z
2016-10-29T15:44:43.883Z
2016-10-29T15:44:43.883Z
cinqS
<p>There was no equivalent of pinyin in ancient Chinese, because Chinese writing developed as a way of representing the spoken language—at first for special purposes (e.g., recording divination), and then later more generally.  If there had been pinyin in, say, the 商 Shang dynasty, they might well have used that <em>instead of</em> Chinese characters.  Why have the (as you say) more complicated Chinese characters at all, if you already have a perfectly good representation in the pinyin?</p>

<p>This sounds a <em>little</em> odd today, because we're used to the idea of Chinese characters, and pinyin is used as a way to indicate their pronunciation, but English gets by perfectly fine using only its equivalent of pinyin (normal English orthography).  Chinese could have done so, if they had had such a system, but keep in mind that the alphabet is a rather deep innovation, and it is by no means obvious, and we should not be surprised that they did not have such a thing around the inception of the Chinese writing system.</p>

<p>Probably by the Three Dynasties period, and certainly no later than the 隋 Sui dynasty, when the 切韻 Qieyun (the oldest surviving example) was created, people used 反切 fanqie as a way to express character pronunciations.  It should be emphasized that fanqie is not spelling as we normally think of it in alphabetic languages.  In principle, it divides Chinese character pronunciations into two parts—an initial and a rhyme—so that the character 東 <em>dōng</em> would be split up into <em>d-</em> and <em>-ōng</em>.</p>

<p>But these two parts would not be represented using new symbols introduced only for phonetic purposes, which would have been the beginning of a true spelling system.  Instead, two other existing characters would be selected, one that shared the initial, and one that shared the rhyme.  In the Qieyun, these characters were 德 <em>dé</em> and 紅 <em>hóng</em>, and so 東 was understood to have a pronunciation that shared the <em>d-</em> with 德 and the <em>-óng</em> with 紅.</p>

<p>To be sure, 東 is first tone and 紅 is second tone, but at the time of the Qieyun (Middle Chinese), both characters were level tone, and what we call level (first) and rising (second) tone are the result of a register split that happened in all four Middle Chinese tones, <em>after</em> the time of the Qieyun.  Mandarin preserves this split of the level tone, but only keeps one side of the rising tone in its third tone, one side of the departing tone in its fourth tone, and loses (in most areas) the entering tone altogether.  Other dialects, such as Cantonese, preserve most of the results of the split.</p>

<p>Note that fanqie merely expresses the pronunciation of one character in terms of two others, so just as someone who is ignorant of English would find it difficult to learn it from a dictionary, someone who is ignorant of <em>all</em> characters cannot learn anything about the pronunciation of <em>any</em> character from fanqie "spellings".  (Also, as a side note, the Qieyun was not intended as a general-use pronunciation reference, but was rather dedicated to Classical readings.)  We might say that equivalence classes of initials and finals are generated by the fanqie spellings, but no explicit values are denoted.  That requires a set of specialized phonetic symbols such as an alphabet.</p>

<hr>

<p>As far as the characters are concerned, they were not always so complicated; in many cases, the so-called "simplified" characters are actually the original form, and what we call "traditional" characters were later elaborations to distinguish two characters with the same pronunciation but radically (pun only partially intended) different meanings.</p>

<p>This came about in part because of the use of 假借 <em>jiǎjiè</em>, or borrowing, in which an existing Chinese character with (typically) a concrete meaning, and therefore a straightforward pictorial or representational depiction, was borrowed for another word with the same pronunciation.  One of the most (in)famous examples is 來 <em>lái</em> "come", whose character represents a wheat stalk, a meaning now captured by the character 麥 <em>mài</em> "wheat".  The simpler character was borrowed for the more common meaning, which led some people to speculate that there was a form <em>lái</em> that meant "wheat"—but in fact, the situation is simpler than that: The original character for "come" was 麥—note the presence of the foot radical at the bottom—so the two characters merely "switched places".</p>

<p>This kind of extended usage is fine if you only want to write something down to remind you of what you yourself meant, but if you want to convey something to someone else, it behooves you to specify it more precisely, which I suspect gave rise to the use of 形聲字 <em>xíngshēngzì</em>, or phonetic-semantic compounds, which account for the vast majority of Chinese characters (around 90 percent, depending on whose count you trust*).  The phonetic components of many of these characters were themselves compounds already, leading to a large nested structure and the array of complicated traditional characters you observe.  (This complication, by the way, is why on the mainland, you'll typically see traditional characters referred to as 繁體字 fántǐzì, to allude to their complexity, whereas Taiwan often refers to them as 正體字 zhèngtǐzì, to allude to their "correctness".)</p>

<p>In short, Chinese writing evolved organically, as the result of countless scribes working independently, and even with the efforts of the Qin dynasty to keep things straight, lots of characters were standardized that today seem pointlessly complicated.  Whether simplified Chinese measurably helps literacy is a different and difficult question to answer, because that too was done somewhat organically and not always consistently.</p>

<p>Hope this helps.  Some of this is just general knowledge, but a couple of (English-language) reference sources that I've found useful are</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Ramsey, S. Robert, <em>The Languages of China</em>.</p></li>
<li><p>Schuessler, Axel, <em>ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese</em>.</p></li>
</ul>

<hr>

<p>*Interestingly, the percentage varies from source to source, but there seems to be general agreement on how many characters are <em>not</em> phonetic-semantic compounds—about 1500—and so the variation in percentage arises almost wholly from how many characters are reckoned to be used in Chinese.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-30T23:09:35.247Z
2016-12-01T08:47:17.533Z
2016-12-01T08:47:17.533Z
Brian Tung
<p>In ancient China, people used Fanqie（反切） to indicate the sound of a character.</p>

<p>For example, in Kangxi Dictionary(康熙词典), the character “微” is:</p>

<p>無非切
[無(<strong>W</strong>u)非(F<strong>ei</strong>)] = Wei</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-29T06:45:46.110Z
2016-11-29T06:45:46.110Z
Xu Jie
<p>The question is the title. Considering pinyin is in romanised form, did the ancient Chinese have pinyin to help them learn characters, or did they just have to repeat them hundreds of times to help them remember what the reading was?</p>

<p>Also, I know that characters have been simplified, but in ancient China why did they make the characters so <em>ludicrously</em> complex, considering they've decided that's a bad idea now? I think 为 is a lot easier to remember than 為 personally. There are other examples like 难 versus 難. In ancient China why did they make the characters have loads of strokes, when its logistically easier to write and remember a character with less strokes?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T15:05:34.660Z
I believe fanqie was the only system for phonetic annotation that was used in ancient China. That would be primarily used for lexicography rather than literacy since fanqie itself involves the use of Chinese characters.
Colin
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T15:13:25.857Z
Some of the stroke complexity comes from the fact that the basic elements of Chinese characters arose as pictographs. For instance 為 comes from a pictograph of a bird. Not much is lost by changing it to 为, since 為 already doesn't look like a bird anymore, and the current use has nothing to do with birds! But you should consider that most Chinese characters can be analyzed into a "meaning part" and a "sound part". In 難, the left hand side is the "sound part", giving a hint that it is pronounced similarly to characters such as 漢 and 嘆. So getting rid of it is not an unambiguous positive.
Colin
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T15:15:15.700Z
That said, the left hand side of 難 is on the more complex side of Chinese character constituents and pretty hard to remember, which is why it was simplified out. But there are other characters where the traditional version has more strokes than the "simplified" version, but is nonetheless easier to remember since the "sound-meaning compound" structure is lost in the simplified version.
Colin
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-10-28T23:39:50.803Z
I'm in my 20s and my grandparents learned "Taiwan pinyin", so it was used and taught in schools during that time. I'm not sure how we changed to pinyin, maybe it is due to the reason that it can make learning English a bit easier, and also make English speaker learning Chinese easier.
EXL
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-28T17:51:07.153Z
@ColinZwanziger Is there a specific reason why you don't turn your comments into an answer?
Tsundoku
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-11-29T06:48:55.920Z
Exept 為 is not a bird, but an elephant used to do heavy work in ancient times (so that's why 為 sometimes mean "to do" "to be" or more originaly "be as" (which is "to use something to do something")
coobit
<etymology><simplified-characters><pinyin><traditional-vs-simplified><glyph-origin>
In ancient China, was there an equivalent of pinyin?
# In ancient China, was there an equivalent of pinyin?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2016-10-28)

The question is the title. Considering pinyin is in romanised form, did the ancient Chinese have pinyin to help them learn characters, or did they just have to repeat them hundreds of times to help them remember what the reading was?

Also, I know that characters have been simplified, but in ancient China why did they make the characters so *ludicrously* complex, considering they've decided that's a bad idea now? I think 为 is a lot easier to remember than 為 personally. There are other examples like 难 versus 難. In ancient China why did they make the characters have loads of strokes, when its logistically easier to write and remember a character with less strokes?

**Tags:** etymology, simplified-characters, pinyin, traditional-vs-simplified, glyph-origin

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I believe fanqie was the only system for phonetic annotation that was used in ancient China. That would be primarily used for lexicography rather than literacy since fanqie itself involves the use of Chinese characters.  
> **username_1**: Some of the stroke complexity comes from the fact that the basic elements of Chinese characters arose as pictographs. For instance 為 comes from a pictograph of a bird. Not much is lost by changing it to 为, since 為 already doesn't look like a bird anymore, and the current use has nothing to do with birds! But you should consider that most Chinese characters can be analyzed into a "meaning part" and a "sound part". In 難, the left hand side is the "sound part", giving a hint that it is pronounced similarly to characters such as 漢 and 嘆. So getting rid of it is not an unambiguous positive.  
> **username_1**: That said, the left hand side of 難 is on the more complex side of Chinese character constituents and pretty hard to remember, which is why it was simplified out. But there are other characters where the traditional version has more strokes than the "simplified" version, but is nonetheless easier to remember since the "sound-meaning compound" structure is lost in the simplified version.  
> **username_2**: I'm in my 20s and my grandparents learned "Taiwan pinyin", so it was used and taught in schools during that time. I'm not sure how we changed to pinyin, maybe it is due to the reason that it can make learning English a bit easier, and also make English speaker learning Chinese easier.  
> **username_3**: @ColinZwanziger Is there a specific reason why you don't turn your comments into an answer?  
> **username_4**: Exept 為 is not a bird, but an elephant used to do heavy work in ancient times (so that's why 為 sometimes mean "to do" "to be" or more originaly "be as" (which is "to use something to do something")  

---

## 3 answers

### Answer by username_5 on 2016-10-28. Score: 0 | Accepted answer

Considering Chinese as Hieroglyphics or Logogram. This language has it own granularity as basic element.

## A - 1

Yes, we did have some mechanism / program the same with Pinyin

> [FanQie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie) as the most popular one

and thinking of Taiwan, the Pinyin is not actually very popular there, they have another set of *thing*

> [Taiwan Pinyin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_romanization_in_Taiwan)

## A - 2

Also considering what I said, Chinese as Hieroglyphics, this language characters apply the shape of things.

Like anything in the world, things came out very complex firstly, and then when people get good at it, they know how to reduce the complexity.

For the Simplified Chinese in 1970s, it was aiming at popularizing the education, and eradicating illiteracy by making the character easier to learn to the general folks.

### P.S

I'm not a linguist at all, I just explained something that I knew and from my point of view. Hope these would help.

> **Comments:**
> **username_6**: I think the Taiwan pinyin is known as bpmf, correct me if I am wrong.  
> **username_5**: @KennyGuy, Hi, if you meant __BoPoMoFo__ by __bpmf__, it is for Mandarin Chinese I think, check out this [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo)  
> **username_0**: Is fanqie still used at all?  
> **username_5**: @DanielCann, No, not at all, I mean, Maybe some professors are studying on that... but from what I see, no one is using that. It's complex, painful when using it  
> **username_7**: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%9F%BB%E6%9B%B8  
> **username_8**: Taiwan used to use 通用拼音 tongyong pinyin, but since 2008, the ROC government has actually standardized on hanyu pinyin.  
> **username_5**: @username_8, did you mean RC (Republic of China) by ROC? and thanks for the information about general pinyin.  
> **username_8**: @username_5: Yes.  I've never seen that abbreviated as RC, only as ROC.  
> **username_5**: @username_8, sure, you are right. I double checked. it's ROC for Republic Of China. Thanks.  

---

### Answer by username_8 on 2016-11-30. Score: 2

There was no equivalent of pinyin in ancient Chinese, because Chinese writing developed as a way of representing the spoken language—at first for special purposes (e.g., recording divination), and then later more generally. If there had been pinyin in, say, the 商 Shang dynasty, they might well have used that *instead of* Chinese characters. Why have the (as you say) more complicated Chinese characters at all, if you already have a perfectly good representation in the pinyin?

This sounds a *little* odd today, because we're used to the idea of Chinese characters, and pinyin is used as a way to indicate their pronunciation, but English gets by perfectly fine using only its equivalent of pinyin (normal English orthography). Chinese could have done so, if they had had such a system, but keep in mind that the alphabet is a rather deep innovation, and it is by no means obvious, and we should not be surprised that they did not have such a thing around the inception of the Chinese writing system.

Probably by the Three Dynasties period, and certainly no later than the 隋 Sui dynasty, when the 切韻 Qieyun (the oldest surviving example) was created, people used 反切 fanqie as a way to express character pronunciations. It should be emphasized that fanqie is not spelling as we normally think of it in alphabetic languages. In principle, it divides Chinese character pronunciations into two parts—an initial and a rhyme—so that the character 東 *dōng* would be split up into *d-* and *-ōng*.

But these two parts would not be represented using new symbols introduced only for phonetic purposes, which would have been the beginning of a true spelling system. Instead, two other existing characters would be selected, one that shared the initial, and one that shared the rhyme. In the Qieyun, these characters were 德 *dé* and 紅 *hóng*, and so 東 was understood to have a pronunciation that shared the *d-* with 德 and the *-óng* with 紅.

To be sure, 東 is first tone and 紅 is second tone, but at the time of the Qieyun (Middle Chinese), both characters were level tone, and what we call level (first) and rising (second) tone are the result of a register split that happened in all four Middle Chinese tones, *after* the time of the Qieyun. Mandarin preserves this split of the level tone, but only keeps one side of the rising tone in its third tone, one side of the departing tone in its fourth tone, and loses (in most areas) the entering tone altogether. Other dialects, such as Cantonese, preserve most of the results of the split.

Note that fanqie merely expresses the pronunciation of one character in terms of two others, so just as someone who is ignorant of English would find it difficult to learn it from a dictionary, someone who is ignorant of *all* characters cannot learn anything about the pronunciation of *any* character from fanqie "spellings". (Also, as a side note, the Qieyun was not intended as a general-use pronunciation reference, but was rather dedicated to Classical readings.) We might say that equivalence classes of initials and finals are generated by the fanqie spellings, but no explicit values are denoted. That requires a set of specialized phonetic symbols such as an alphabet.

---

As far as the characters are concerned, they were not always so complicated; in many cases, the so-called "simplified" characters are actually the original form, and what we call "traditional" characters were later elaborations to distinguish two characters with the same pronunciation but radically (pun only partially intended) different meanings.

This came about in part because of the use of 假借 *jiǎjiè*, or borrowing, in which an existing Chinese character with (typically) a concrete meaning, and therefore a straightforward pictorial or representational depiction, was borrowed for another word with the same pronunciation. One of the most (in)famous examples is 來 *lái* "come", whose character represents a wheat stalk, a meaning now captured by the character 麥 *mài* "wheat". The simpler character was borrowed for the more common meaning, which led some people to speculate that there was a form *lái* that meant "wheat"—but in fact, the situation is simpler than that: The original character for "come" was 麥—note the presence of the foot radical at the bottom—so the two characters merely "switched places".

This kind of extended usage is fine if you only want to write something down to remind you of what you yourself meant, but if you want to convey something to someone else, it behooves you to specify it more precisely, which I suspect gave rise to the use of 形聲字 *xíngshēngzì*, or phonetic-semantic compounds, which account for the vast majority of Chinese characters (around 90 percent, depending on whose count you trust\*). The phonetic components of many of these characters were themselves compounds already, leading to a large nested structure and the array of complicated traditional characters you observe. (This complication, by the way, is why on the mainland, you'll typically see traditional characters referred to as 繁體字 fántǐzì, to allude to their complexity, whereas Taiwan often refers to them as 正體字 zhèngtǐzì, to allude to their "correctness".)

In short, Chinese writing evolved organically, as the result of countless scribes working independently, and even with the efforts of the Qin dynasty to keep things straight, lots of characters were standardized that today seem pointlessly complicated. Whether simplified Chinese measurably helps literacy is a different and difficult question to answer, because that too was done somewhat organically and not always consistently.

Hope this helps. Some of this is just general knowledge, but a couple of (English-language) reference sources that I've found useful are

* Ramsey, S. Robert, *The Languages of China*.
* Schuessler, Axel, *ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese*.

---

\*Interestingly, the percentage varies from source to source, but there seems to be general agreement on how many characters are *not* phonetic-semantic compounds—about 1500—and so the variation in percentage arises almost wholly from how many characters are reckoned to be used in Chinese.


---

### Answer by username_9 on 2016-11-29. Score: 1

In ancient China, people used Fanqie（反切） to indicate the sound of a character.

For example, in Kangxi Dictionary(康熙词典), the character “微” is:

無非切
[無(**W**u)非(F**ei**)] = Wei


---

