Di- and trigraphia among the A-Hmao in Yunnan Province, China

• Autores: Joakim Enwall
• Localización: International journal of the sociology of language, ISSN 0165-2516, Nº. 150, 2001, págs. 95-107
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the di- and trigraphia that has evolved among the A-Hmao in northeastern and central Yunnan since the late 1950s and particularly after the reform movements initiated in the 1980s. The A-Hmao language, of the Miao language group, spoken by approximately 300,000 people, remained unwritten until the beginning of the twentieth century. The British missionary Samuel Pollard devised a script based on Cree, Pitman's shorthand, and Latin letters. It gained enormous success during the ensuing decades. In 1958 the Chinese authorities endorsed a Hanyu Pinyin±based writing system, but it was propagated only after 1980. In theory this 1958 orthography is used on a trial basis until the People's Congress can sanction it. Nonetheless, authorities dealing with the use of A-Hmao writing in Yunnan have launched a reformed Pollard script incorporating the linguistic analysis underlying the 1958 script.