Foochow Romanized, also known as Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC for short; ) or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê (), is a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

for the

Fuzhou dialect Fuzhou (; , Fuzhounese: Hokchew, ''Hók-ciŭ''), alternately romanized as Foochow, is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian province, China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute ...

Eastern Min Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄), is a branch of the Min group of Sinitic languages of China. The prestige form and most-cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian. G ...

adopted in the middle of the 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of church circles, and was taught in some mission schools in Fuzhou. However, unlike its counterpart

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (; ; ), also sometimes known as the Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien. Developed by Western missionary, missionaries ...

for

Hokkien The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages ...

, even in its prime days Foochow Romanized was by no means universally understood by Christians. R. S. Maclay, C. C. Baldwin, Samuel H. Leger: Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect, 1929

History

After Fuzhou became one of the five Chinese

treaty port Treaty ports (; ja, 条約港) were the port cities in China and Japan that were opened to foreign trade mainly by the unequal treaties forced upon them by Western powers, as well as cities in Korea opened up similarly by the Japanese Empire. ...

s opened by the

Treaty of Nanjing The Treaty of Nanjing was the peace treaty which ended the First Opium War (1839–1842) between Great Britain and the Qing dynasty of China on 29 August 1842. It was the first of what the Chinese later termed the Unequal Treaties. In the ...

at the end of First Opium War (from 1839 to 1842), many Western missionaries arrived in the city. Faced with widespread illiteracy, they developed Latin alphabets for the

. The first attempt in romanizing the Fuzhou dialect was made by the American Methodist M. C. White, who borrowed a system of orthography known as the System of Sir William Jones. In this system, 14

initials In a written or published work, an initial capital, also referred to as a drop capital or simply an initial cap, initial, initcapital, initcap or init or a drop cap or drop, is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that ...

were designed exactly according to their voicing and aspiration. , , and stand for , , and ; while the Greek spiritus lenis were affixed to the above initials to represent their aspirated counterparts. Besides the default five

vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

, four diacritic-marked letters , , and were also introduced, representing , , , and , respectively. This system is described at length in White's linguistic work '' The Chinese Language Spoken at Fuh Chau''. Subsequent missionaries, including Robert S. Maclay from

American Methodist Episcopal Mission American Methodist Episcopal Mission (AMEM; also known as Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church ''MEFB was the missionary society of the Methodist Episcopal Church that was involved in sending workers to countries such as C ...

, R. W. Stewart from the

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britai ...

and Charles Hartwell from the American Board Mission, further modified White's system in several ways. The most significant change was made for the plosive

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...

, where the spiritus lenis of the aspirated initials was removed and the letters , and substituted for and . In the aspect of

, , , and were replaced by , , and . Since the

diacritical marks A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

were all shifted to underneath the vowels, this left room above the vowels which was occupied by the newly introduced tonal marks. Thus Foochow Romanized avoids the potentially awkward diacritic stacking seen for instance in the Vietnamese script, where tone and vowel quality marks both sit above the vowel.

Alphabet

The sample characters are taken from the ''

Qi Lin Bayin The ''Qi Lin Bayin'', sometimes translated as ''Book of Eight Sounds'' or ''Book of Eight Tones'', is a Chinese rime book of approximately ten thousand characters based on the earlier form of the Fuzhou dialect. First compiled in the 17th centur ...

'', a renowned phonology book about the Fuzhou dialect written in the

Qing Dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-spea ...

. The pronunciations are recorded in standard IPA symbols.

Initials

Finals

Finals without codas

Finals with coda

Finals with codas ŋand k

Tones

Note that Foochow Romanized uses the

breve A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in S ...

, not the

caron A caron (), háček or haček (, or ; plural ''háčeks'' or ''háčky'') also known as a hachek, wedge, check, kvačica, strešica, mäkčeň, varnelė, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, flying bird, inverted chevron, is a diacritic mark (� ...

(ˇ), to indicate Yīnpíng and Yángrù tones of Fuzhou dialect.

Sample text

IPA

References

External links

* Everything You Want To Know About Foochow Romanized (in Foochowese)
Gô Iók Cŭ
The Old Testament, in Foochow Romanized.
Sĭng Iók Cŭ
The New Testament, in Foochow Romanized.
An English-Chinese Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect
by T. B. Adam, 1905 * {{Min Chinese Latin-script orthographies Romanization of Chinese Culture in Fujian