Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation


The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was the organization established by Beiyang government in 1912 select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin, and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.

History

It was decided in a draft on 7 August 1912, a month after a conference led by the Cai Yuanpei on July 10, that a set of phonetic symbols were to be used for education purposes. The Commission was set up in December, led by Wu Zhihui . The Commission ended on 22 May 1913. A later similar organization that still exists that had been headed by Wu Zhihui for a while is the Mandarin Promotion Council.

Members

The first meeting took place on 15 February 1913 in Beijing, with 44 delegates. The chairman was Wu; vice-chairman Wang Zhao. There were two representatives per each of the 26 provinces. The Tibetans, the Mongolians and the overseas Chinese each had one representative. Prominent members included:
There were three main ideas of how the phonetic symbols should be:
The three groups discussed for two months and adopted 15 symbols from Zhang Binglin's all-Zhuanshu Jiyin Zimu, which was the proposal by the Zhejiang Committee. Jiyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao.
After its proclamation, several aspects of Zhuyin were further modified, including:
The Commission established the Seven Mandarin Sound Promotion Programs :
  1. Proclaimed Zhuyin Zimu.
  2. All provinces were to establish places to promote and study the 6500 standardized Mandarin sounds, where the county representatives would gather and return to their counties to spread the words.
  3. Using the gramophone to record the exact pronunciation.
  4. Having Mandarin be a compulsory subject in all elementary school.
  5. All teachers were to speak solely in Mandarin in elementary and middle schools.
  6. All textbooks and some official documents were to be annotated by Zhuyin.