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Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation

Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會 Pinyin: Dúyīn Tǒngyī Huì) was established in the Republic of China (then still based in Nanjing) from 1912 to 1913 to select an ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin Chinese (Zhuyin was the product) and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.

Table of contents
1 History
2 Members
3 Phonetic symbols
4 Programs

History

It was decided in a draft on August 7, 1912, a month after a conference led by the Cai Yuanpei in July 10, that a set of phonetic symbols are to be used for education purposes. The Commission was set up in December, led by Woo Tsin-hang. The Commission ended on May 22, 1913. A later similar organization that still exists, also headed by Woo Tsin-hang for a while, is the Mandarin Promotion Council.

Members

The first meeting took place on February 15, 1913 in Beijing, with 44 delegates. The chairman was Woo; vice-chairman Wang Zhao (王照). There were two representatives per each of the 26 provincess. The Tibetans, the Mongolians and the overseas Chinese each have one representative. Prominent members include:

Phonetic symbols

There three main ideas of how the phonetic symbols should be:
The three groups discussed for two months and adopted 15 symbols from Zhang Binglin's all-Zhuanshu Ziyin Zimu (記音字母), which was the proposal by the Zhejiang Committee. Ziyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao.

After its proclamation, several aspects of Zhuyin were further modified, including:

Programs

The Commission established the Seven Mandarin Sound Promotion Programs (《國音推行方法七條》 Guoyu Tuixing Fang'an Qi Tiao):