Latinxua Sin Wenz
Promoted as a revolutionary reform to combat illiteracy and replace Chinese characters, Sin Wenz distinctively does not indicate tones, for pragmatic reasons and to encourage the use of everyday colloquial language.
The work towards constructing the Beifangxua Latinxua Sin Wenz (北方話拉丁化新文字) system began in Moscow as early as 1928 when the Soviet Scientific Research Institute on China sought to create a means through which the large Chinese population living in the far eastern region of the USSR could be made literate,[b] facilitating their further education.
This was significantly different from all other romanization schemes in that, from the very outset, it was intended that the Latinxua Sin Wenz system, once established, would supersede the Chinese characters.
In 1931 a coordinated effort between the Soviet sinologists Alekseyev V.M., Dragunov A.A. and Shprintsin A. G., and the Moscow-based Chinese scholars Qu Qiubai, Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu, Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao, and Xu Teli established the Latinxua Sin Wenz system.
Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy (in characters) for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Society's new journal.
Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies (including Lincoln, Franklin, Edison, Ford, and Charlie Chaplin), some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks.
[7] For a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in Northern China; and more than 300 publications totaling half a million issues appeared in Latinxua Sin Wenz.
[1] However: In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the communist-controlled areas [of China] on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system.
The letters below represent only one of the thirteen possible schemes present, the below form being Beifangxua Latinxua Sin Wenz: that for Northern Mandarin.
In order to circumvent this problem, Sin Wenz defined a list of exceptions: "characters with fixed spellings" (Chinese: 定型字).
[13] In addition, Sin Wenz also calls for the use of the postal romanization when writing place names in China, as well as preservation of foreign spellings (hence Latinxua rather than *Ladingxua).
The subtitle of Dhazung Bao is in a Shanghainese adaptation of Sin Wenz, where dh represents the voiced alveolar plosive /d/ , and the zh initial does not exist.
Sheqben is the Shanghainese romanization of 日本 "Japan", where sh represents the voiced alveolar fricative /z/ , and q represents the glottal stop /ʔ/ .
The pronunciation Lusin instead of * Lusyn ( Lu Xun ) is an example of Sin Wenz not following Beijing pronunciation.
