Chinese Language and Christianity

Hi everybody,

I regret that I couln’t meet you at our usual time today. I hope you had fun practicing the tones you’ve learned. I want to use this web space to share with you some of the lesser known facts related to Chinese.

Today I want to tell you about one effect Christianity – in particular Catholicism had on Chinese.

Now that you are introduced to Pinyin, what do you think of the origin of Romanization? Do you think it is as old as the written Chinese? Were you surprised that it is based on Roman alphabet?

Pinyin is only the current standard way of Romanization for Mandarin Chinese. In the past, many other systems existed. But compared to the entire 4,000 years of written history, this part of the Chinese language is very young. Romanization started during the 16th century when the Jesuit missionaries arrived from Spain and Portugal.

The first ever Romanization systems were created by Matteo Ricci in 1605, and Nicolas Trigault in 1625. The idea was to transcribe the Chinese using their roman or latin letters as an aid to learn Manderin.

If not for the Jesuits to initiate this effort, we would still be learning Chinese the hard way!

Later on, other Christian missionaries arrived and developed various Romanization systems. Pinyin was officially approved by the Chinese government in the 1950s. It is also recognized as the official Romanization methods by the UN and the United States. If you open a National Geographic map that’s about China, you will see all the annotation for names are written in Pinyin.