Bàng-uâ-cê ( abbr. BUC; zh, t=平話字) or Fuzhou romanization (), is a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

for the Fuzhou dialect of

Eastern Min Eastern Min or Min Dong (, Foochow Romanized: ) is a branch of the Min group of the Chinese languages of China. The prestige form and most commonly cited representative form is the Fuzhou dialect, the speech of the capital of Fujian. Geogra ...

adopted in the middle of the 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Bàng-uâ-cê was mainly used inside of church circles, and was taught in some mission schools in

Fuzhou Fuzhou is the capital of Fujian, China. The city lies between the Min River (Fujian), Min River estuary to the south and the city of Ningde to the north. Together, Fuzhou and Ningde make up the Eastern Min, Mindong linguistic and cultural regi ...

. However, unlike its counterpart

Pe̍h-ōe-jī ( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing syst ...

for

Hokkien Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...

, even in its prime days Bàng-uâ-cê 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

became one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanjing 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 Fuzhou dialect. 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 were designed exactly according to their voicing and aspiration. , , and stand for , , and ; while the Greek

spiritus lenis The smooth breathing (; ''psilí''; ) is a diacritical mark used in polytonic orthography. In Ancient Greek, it marks the absence of the voiceless glottal fricative from the beginning of a word. Some authorities have interpreted it as repre ...

were affixed to the above initials to represent their aspirated counterparts. Besides the default five

vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

, 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, R. W. Stewart from the

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the State religion#State churches, established List of Christian denominations, Christian church in England and the Crown Dependencies. It is the mother church of the Anglicanism, Anglican Christian tradition, ...

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 In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

, where the

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 were all shifted to underneath the vowels, this left room above the vowels which was occupied by the newly introduced tonal marks. Thus Bàng-uâ-cê 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'', a renowned phonology book about the Fuzhou dialect written in the

Qing Dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

. The pronunciations are recorded in standard IPA symbols.

Initials

Finals

Finals without codas

Finals with coda

Finals with codas ŋand k

Tones

Note that Bàng-uâ-cê uses the

breve A breve ( , less often , grammatical gender, 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 ...

, not the

caron A caron or háček ( ), is a diacritic mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer ...

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

Sample text

References

External links

* Everything You Want To Know About Bàng-uâ-cê (in Foochowese)
Gô Iók Cŭ
The Old Testament, in Bàng-uâ-cê.
Sĭng Iók Cŭ
The New Testament, in Bàng-uâ-cê.
An English-Chinese Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect
by T. B. Adam, 1905 *
Chinese Character to Eastern Min Transliterator
{{Min Chinese Latin-script orthographies Romanization of Chinese Culture in Fujian Writing systems introduced in the 19th century 19th-century establishments in China