【转载】关于国语的京国之争（英文 写为京吴之争）

tiyz

在国外的报道变成了京吴之争

The most important issue confronting the assembly was the question of what sounds were to be represented by these symbols. In view of the fact that the conference which the delegates had been invited to attend had been designated as a Conference on Unification of Pronunciation, their task was clearly one of deciding on a standard language for the whole country. On this issue the delegates split into two groups. One comprised delegates from the Mandarin-speaking area under the leadership of Wang Chao. The other consisted of representatives from the southern coastal area under the leadership of the Kiangsu-Chekiang bloc, which in turn was led by Wu Chih-hui and Wang Jung-pao of Kiangsu, the latter being the man who in 1906 had drafted the reply of the Ministry of Education rejecting the phonetic scheme proposed by Lu Kan-chang. The two groups were about equal in strength. The focal point of their disagreement was Wang Chao's insistence that the Mandarin pronunciation should be taken as the standard as against the equally strong contention of southern representatives that such a procedure would not meet the problem of southern dialect sounds not existing in Mandarin. "Southerners cannot get along without voiced sounds and the entering tone," maintained Wang Jung-pao. He was echoed in this by Wu Chih-hui, who argued that Germany was strong because its language contained many voiced sounds and that China was weak because Mandarin was lacking in them.

After a month of stalemate Wang Chao called a separate meeting of the thirty delegates, a majority of those attending the conference, who were representatives either of the Mandarin area or of the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. Wang told his audience that the stand taken by the absent Kiangsu-Chekiang bloc was tantamount to advocating the pronunciation of this region as the national language, a course which if adopted would bring disaster to China for generations to come. He repeated this assertion to the plenary conference and also advanced a proposal for a new system of voting to resolve the deadlock. His suggestion, calling for one vote for each province regardless of number of delegates, was quickly identified as a means of giving ascendancy to the numerically preponderant Mandarin provinces. The conference was thrown into an uproar. Wang Chao attempted to exert pressure to split the southern group by threatening to walk out on what he referred to as the "Kiangsu-Chekiang Conference on Unification of Pronunciation." Finally he almost came to blows with Wang Jung-pao. One day, when the latter happened to use the colloquial Shanghai expression huang-pao ch`e "rickshaw," Wang Chao mis-heard it as the Mandarin oath wang-pa tan "turtle's egg," whereupon he bared his arms and chased the speaker out of the hall. That was the last of Wang Jung-pao at the conference.

The upshot of all this controversy was a complete victory for the Mandarin group. Wang Chao got his way in the matter of voting procedure and was thereby enabled to end the more than three months of discussion by receiving approval for a series of agreements to his liking. The symbols remained limited to the 39 needed for representing the sounds of the standard language. They were to be used only for the standard language and were not to be adapted for writing the various dialects of the coastal area. The standard language was defined by fixing the pronunciation of some 6,500 characters in a Dictionary of National Pronunciation. Finally, accord was reached on submitting to the Ministry of Education a series of recommendations under the general heading of How to Promote the National Pronunciation. Chief among these recommendations were the following: (1) The Ministry of Education should immediately promulgate the alphabet. (2) The Ministry of Education should call on the highest officials in the provinces to expedite the learning of the symbols by establishing Bureaus for Propagating the Alphabet of National Pronunciation. (3) The National Literature course in primary schools should be replaced or supplemented by a National Language course. The national pronunciation should be taught by primary school teachers, and also by teachers of National Literature courses in middle and normal schools. (4) After the publication of the Dictionary of National Pronunciation, the national pronunciation should be indicated alongside the Chinese characters in primary school textbooks and in all public documents.

-Nationalism and Language Reform in China, DeFrancis, Princeton University Press, 1950.

［ 本帖最后由 tiyz 于 2009-03-10 19:46:00 编辑 ］

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