Lu Zhuangzhang
| Lu Zhuangzhang | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Born | 1854 Tong'an, Xiamen, Fujian Province |
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| Died | December 28, 1928 Xiamen |
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| Occupation | linguist, translator, lexicographer | ||||||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 盧戇章 | ||||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 卢戆章 | ||||||||||||
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| Courtesy name | |||||||||||||
| Chinese | 祥瑛 | ||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Lú Zhuàngzhāng |
| Wade–Giles | Lu Chuang-chang |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Lô͘ Gōng-chiong |
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Xiángyīng |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Siông-eng |
Lu Zhuangzhang (盧戇章, 1854–1928) was the first Chinese scholar to develop a system for the romanization of Chinese, the Qieyin Xinzi (切音新字 "New Phonetic Alphabet") in 1892, which stimulated Chinese interest in script reform from inefficient Chinese characters to basic alphabetic spelling. Lu was an influential and prolific Chinese language reformer in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and early Republic of China (1912–49).
Lu was born in Fujian Province on the southeast coast of China and was raised in Xiamen (historically called Amoy) where Christian missionaries had introduced a romanization of the local variety of Chinese that was widely used in newspapers and books. When he was 18, Lu Zhuangzhang failed the imperial examination for the civil service, and he subsequently converted to Christianity and sought out opportunities in the missionary community. In 1875, at the age of 21, Lu moved to Singapore where he intensively studied English. After returning to Xiamen in 1879, he worked as a language tutor and translator for Chinese and foreigners. John MacGowan of the London Missionary Society recruited Lu to help compile the English and Chinese Dictionary of the Amoy Dialect (1883), which used the romanization system from Carstairs Douglas' Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy (1873) (Tsu and Elman 2014: 131).
While assisting MacGowan, Lu extensively worked with the missionaries' system of huàyīn (話音 "speech-sound script") that used Latin alphabet letters to transcribe local varieties of Chinese, and came to believe that he could develop a better system. The speech-sound script required several letters to convey a pronunciation, making some word spellings longer than others. Lu devised a streamlined system of 55 distinctly pronounced zimu (字母 "alphabet letters"), symbols largely derived from the Latin alphabet. Based on the traditional Chinese fanqie method of indicating pronunciation with one Chinese character for the initial consonant and another for the final sound, Lu's system spelled each syllable with two zimu signs denoting the initial and final (Kaske 2008: 97).
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