[
    {
        "id": 204587,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1963",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "CHANGES IN CHINESE LANGUAGE\n\n57\n\nA new term, Kuo-yü #, meaning national language, came into use soon after the founding of the republic in 1911. A phonetic system based on kuan-hua had been devised in 1909 but then discarded because it proved inadequate as a means of mass communication. The term Kuo-yü rapidly won acceptance, replacing kuan-hua first in official circles and then gradually, in other circles as well.\n\nThe promotion of Kuo-yü, already nation-wide, received new impetus when some prominent scholars, notably Ch'ien Hsüan-tung 錢玄同, Li Chin-hsi 黎錦熙 and Chao Yuan-jen 趙元任, backed by the government, announced that the term Kuo-yü should be used in a broader sense than \"current standard language of the nation\". They held that it should mean \"unification of the national language, study of dialects and preparation of a phonetic script\". They also suggested that because of Peking's geographical and historical position, the Peking dialect should be chosen as the standard national language.\n\nFor almost fifty years such efforts to create a national language have constituted the main current of Chinese language reform. This is not the place to give a full account of the successes and failure of these efforts. We shall merely summarise their most important results. Their first result was the adoption in 1913 of the chu-yin tzu-mu ✯✯$ or National Phonetic Alphabet for use in dictionaries and text books. This alphabet rendered the sound of each character much more accurately than the traditionally fan-ch'ieh, which had been cumbersome and difficult to learn. Another important accomplishment of the Kuo-yü movement was the introduction of the so-called Gwoyeu Romatzyh # or National Romanization, formally adopted under the name of Kuo-yin tzu-mu ti-erh shih #\"second form of national alphabet\". This system represented the first attempt by Chinese linguists to replace the traditional characters by a romanized script based on the Latin alphabet. Although it never gained popular acceptance, it helped greatly to establish Kuo-yü as the national language; and the promotion of it for this purpose was in fact one of the important turning points in the course of recent changes in the Chinese language.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206911,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1973",
        "page_number": 188,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "182\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nmajor systems of romanization now in use by English speaking sinologists, viz. Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Pinyin, and Yale. This alone might make the book worth the money to those of us who have trouble keeping them all sorted out. I, for one, would like to call for a revised and expanded version, with smaller print and less wasted space and adding the French, German, and Russian systems. In such a form one might predict that it would be a must for every beginning scholar in the field.\n\nCornell University, 1972.\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nARMANDO DA SILVA. TAI YU SHAN, TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL ADAPTION IN A SOUTH CHINESE ISLAND. Taipei, Orient Cultural Service, 1972 pp. 102, U.S.$4.75.\n\nThis brief work is one in the series 'Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs' (Vol. XXXII) edited by Professor Lou Tsu-k'uang in collaboration with Professor Wolfram Eberhard. The author was educated in Hong Kong and at the time of publication was on the faculty of the Geography Department in the University of Hawaii. The book is of particular interest to Hong Kong residents because it is written about the Colony's largest island, Lantau or Tai Yu Shan; and because little has been written on the particular aspects of local rural life with which he deals,\n\nThe book is an abridged version of a master's thesis for the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, for which the field work was done on Lantau in 1962-64. The author states in his preface: \"I chose the island of Tai Yu Shan as a place for study as it still possessed many cultural relics of archeological, historical, and ecological interest; old forts, abandoned beach-temples, disused lime kilns, ruins of former settlements, hillside terraces in disuse, and well-constructed hillside trails that led to nowhere. Fast disappearing even then were certain forms of livelihood such as sea-weed collecting, stake-net fishing, and hillside liquor distilling. But most of all, I chose Tai Yu Shan because I just enjoyed being there.\" His purpose was to describe a traditional coastal way of life that had endured for so long. \"I thought it important then, as I still do now, that I had to understand and to interpret, before imminent changes made things difficult, the man-land processes that made for the genre of Tai Yu Shan.\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r",
        "rank": 0
    }
]