Gwoyeu Romatzyh facts for kids

Gwoyeu Romatzyh, often called GR, is a special way to write Mandarin Chinese using the letters of the Roman alphabet (like A, B, C). It was created in the late 1920s by a smart linguist named Yuen Ren Chao and his team. The main idea behind GR was to show the different "tones" of Mandarin words right in their spelling.

What is Gwoyeu Romatzyh?

Mandarin Chinese is a "tone language." This means the meaning of a word can change just by how your voice goes up or down when you say it. For example, the sound "ma" can mean "mother," "horse," "scold," or "hemp," depending on the tone.

Most ways of writing Chinese with Roman letters, like Pinyin, use special marks above the letters to show tones (like mā for mother). But GR uses different spellings for the same sound to show the tone. This is called "tonal spelling."

How Tones Work in GR

In GR, the spelling of a word changes depending on its tone. For example, the sound chai can be written in four ways:

• chai for the first tone (like chāi in Pinyin)
• chair for the second tone (like chái in Pinyin)
• chae for the third tone (like chăi in Pinyin)
• chay for the fourth tone (like chài in Pinyin)

This means you don't need to add extra marks to the letters.

Why Was GR Created?

Yuen Ren Chao created GR to help more people in China learn to read and write. In the early 1900s, many people in China could not read. He thought that writing tones directly into the spelling would make it easier to learn and print, as it avoids adding special tone marks.

Other languages, like Hmong, also use tonal spelling. However, GR has many unique rules and exceptions for how each sound's spelling changes with its tone. This makes it quite complex.

Was GR Easy to Learn?

Many people found Gwoyeu Romatzyh quite difficult to learn because of its many rules and exceptions. Even so, some people still prefer GR over Pinyin.

Supporters of GR believed it would help people remember tones better. However, studies have not shown this to be true. One study even found that people who learned Chinese using Pinyin were better at speaking with the correct tones after a year than those who used GR.

GR Today

After the Communist Party of China took control of China, they decided to use Pinyin as the main way to write Chinese with Roman letters. Because of this, GR is not widely used in mainland China today.

However, you can still find GR in some places. For example, the name of the Chinese province Shaanxi is written in GR. If it were written in Pinyin without tone marks, it would be "Shanxi." But there is already another province called Shanxi (which is Shānxī in Pinyin). To avoid confusion, the GR spelling "Shaanxi" is used for the first province.

In Taiwan, GR is not the official way to write Chinese. But you might still see it on road signs, in people's names, or on product labels.

Below are some examples of sentences written in Chinese characters, Pinyin, and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, along with their English translations.

Images for kids

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  Gwoyeu Romatzyh in use on a park sign in Taipei. Taytzyy = 太子 = Tàizǐ

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  Lin Yutang, who first proposed tonal spelling

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  Yuen Ren Chao, the chief designer of GR, as a young man (c. 1916)

See also

In Spanish: Gwoyeu romatzyh para niños