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 The writing systems of early man used pictographs; small pictures that represented ideas. Western man simplified some of these pictographs to represent the actual "sounds" of their spoken language. This simplification led to the evolution of phonetic alphabets and dictionaries.
In China, where writing with pictures is believed to have originated in the Yellow River region around 2,000 B.C., the use of pictographs has remained relatively intact with few changes over the centuries. This makes written Chinese one of the world's oldest script systems still in continuous use.
There are two elements to the Chinese language: the spoken language, which includes a number of different dialects across the country, and the written language, which is based on individual symbols called characters.
Each of the more than 50,000 Chinese pictographs in existence is a highly stylized picture of a unique idea or thing. Chinese characters, or ideographs, are not phonetic symbols and they bear no relationship to the sound of the spoken language. You cannot tell how to pronounce a given pictograph by merely looking at it. China's written language originally had no alphabet, but it was easily understood by literate people no matter what dialect they spoke.
Mandarin is the basis for standard written Chinese, the universal bond among Chinese of all dialects. This is a critical point, because Chinese dialects are not the same as Western dialects, or accents. They are more like different languages and are often unintelligible to other Chinese.
An American from Brooklyn, New York, would have a "Brooklyn" accent. An American from the Mississippi delta region would have a "Southern" accent. An Englishman from Liverpool, England, would have a "British" accent (to Americans anyway). Even so, these three people understand each other, because their words are recognizable as English.
A resident of northern China who speaks Min Pei would have trouble conversing with someone from Canton who spoke Cantonese unless they wrote down characters so each would understand the other. This is why China's common written language is so important. Although the government vigorously encourages the use of putonghua as the national language, regional traditions are hard to overcome.
Chinese characters are not based on any systematic alphabet. This presents a major problem for anyone trying to order Chinese characters in a dictionary, particularly one intended for use by non-Chinese. In an effort to get around this problem, Sir Thomas Francis Wade devised a method to "transliterate" Chinese language characters for the Western world by using the Latin alphabet to "spell" the proper pronunciation of Chinese. This system was later modified by Cambridge professor Herbert Allen Giles in his Chinese-English Dictionary (1912). Once established, the Wade-Giles Romanization System became the preferred method for Chinese transliteration among English-speaking countries.
The Chinese themselves have experimented with several systems to romanize local expressions for non-Chinese publications. Attempts to romanize the language began in the early 16th century and eventually more than 50 different systems evolved, but none succeeded to any great degree until the 1950s.
The diligent efforts and hard work of thousands of Chinese linguistic experts produced the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet System (Hanyu Pinyin Fangan), known as Pinyin (pin-een), which was adopted by National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China on February 21, 1958, as a replacement for the old Wade-Giles and Lessing systems of romanizing Chinese script.
The Pinyin method of writing Chinese uses a modified Roman alphabet to phonetically spell the proper pronunciation of Chinese characters. Even though Chinese sounds only roughly correspond to the English pronunciation of Pinyin, it closely corresponds to the standard phonetic system used in China. Since its inception, Pinyin has become a generally recognized standard for romanizing the Chinese language throughout most of the world.
Pinyin uses the Roman alphabet to notate the more than 400 basic syllables in the common speech of modern Chinese into syllables. It has found widespread use throughout China to facilitate the learning of Chinese characters and to help unify pronunciation and popularize common speech.
You often see Pinyin used on shop fronts, street signs, and advertising billboards in many of China's major cities. In the smaller towns and in the countryside however, you may not see a single Pinyin sign anywhere. Travel in the outlying areas of China requires that you either be able to speak Chinese or carry a phrase book with Chinese characters. Helpful as it is, Pinyin is not a shortcut to communication, since Westerners often mispronounce or miss the correct intonation the romanized word.
In 1979, China officially replaced the earlier version of Pinyin with a clearer phonetic transcription system known as Hanyu Pinyin Wenzi. All translated texts of Chinese diplomatic documents and Chinese magazines published in foreign languages have used the Pinyin system of spelling names and places since 1979.
You have no doubt seen many examples of the change, most notably; "Mao Tse-tung" is now Mao Zedong; "Chou En-lai" is now Zhou Enlai; and "Peking" is now "Beijing." China is still "China" in English. In Pinyin it is "Zhongguo." Certain words are kept in their familiar form, even by the most dedicated users of the Pinyin system. For example the Yangtze river retains that name rather than the Pinyin form, "Chang Jiang"; Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen, both of whose names are familiar in the West from their southern dialect pronunciation, are usually referred to by these familiar forms.
Pinyin not only makes it possible to deduce the Chinese pronunciation from the way a word is spelled, but also makes it possible to produce dictionaries and Chinese language textbooks. Westerners with a background in Latin alphabets feel much more at ease with Pinyin, since it provides them a familiar way to read and write. Even Chinese children learn Pinyin at school before they learn characters.
Despite the general recognition of Pinyin as a standard for romanizing Chinese, there is no apparent international standard as to how to divide words. The variety of approaches taken by Europeans to romanize Chinese and set word divisions shows little evidence of a standard.
The Chinese government has issued standards for word division, but not all publishers and authors conform to its guidelines. Some libraries romanize Chinese in Pinyin and separate all syllables from each other with spaces, while others use the Wade-Giles system of romanization. Some use Pinyin, but combine syllables, then separate the resulting words from each other with hyphens, while others use Wade-Giles, but separate the individual syllables from each other with hyphens. Even dictionaries published in China show inconsistent word division practices.
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