New Phonetic Character is a script created by the Rev. Tarleton Perry Crawford in the 1850s to write Shanghainese. Rev. Crawford (1821-1902), from Kentucky in the USA, was appointed as a missionary to Shanghai by the the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1850. He set off to China with his wife Martha in 1851 and arrived in Shanghai in 1853.
Crawford learned Shanghainese, the variety of Wu Chinese spoken in Shanghai, and worked on documenting the Shanghainese phonology. At that time, missionaries were writing Shanghainese using a romanised script created by Rev. Dr. Taylor. Crawford thought this script did not adequately represent the pronunciation of Shanghainese, and devised a phonetic script which he called 'A System of Phonetic Symbols for writing the Dialects of China', which is also known as ‘New Phonetic Character’. After discussions with other missionaries, such as the Rev. Mr. Pearcy, Crawford realised that Chinese syllables consisted of an initial sound and a final sound and could be written with two symbols, plus a tone mark. After various failed attempts, he was inspired by the character 門 (mén - gate, door) to create symbols with the initial on the left and the final on the write.
In 1888, Crawford published a description of his script in The Chinese Reader and Missionary Journal (Volume 19:3), in which he wrote:
“The huge idiosophic characters have reached the limit of their capacity, and are rapidly sinking under the burden with which they are freighted. Through the course of ages they have become so numerous and complicated in form and sense as to place their acquisition hopelessly beyond the reach of the common people—seven-tenths of them being now wholly unable to read intelligently. … The common characters being already complete and crystalized around the thought of the past, and therefore unable to meet the requirements of the age, must inevitably be superseded by the living dialects of the land, as was the case in Europe. Chinese hieroglyphics, like their Egyptian predecessors, are doomed to the tomb and the antiquary.” [source]
Crawford and other missionaries published a small number of books in New Phonetic Character in Shanghainese, including the Aesop's Fables, the Gospel of Luke, and other religious texts.
In 1892, Crawford and his wife moved to Tengchow (now Penglai (蓬莱 - a district of Yantai City - 烟台市) in Shandong Province, where he learnt and documented the local variety of Jiaoliao Mandarin, and adapted his script to write it.
New Phonetic Character continued to be used to some extent for a few decades, then was quietly forgetten.
Information about Shanghainese | Phrases | Numbers | Books about Shanghainese on: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk [affilate links]
Information about New Phonetic Character
https://serica.blog/2012/12/10/new-phonetic-character/
https://www.academia.edu/74804443/Analysis_of_an_invented_writing_system_for_the_Shanghainese_language
https://babel.hathitrust.org/
Information about Tarleton Perry Crawford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarleton_Perry_Crawford
Information about Shanghainese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghainese
http://www.shanghainese.info
Oracle Bone Script, Simplified characters, Bopomofo, Types of characters, Structure of written Chinese, Evolution of characters, How the Chinese script works, Xiao'erjing, General Chinese, New Phonetic Character (for Shanghainese)
Page last modified: 17.10.25
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