Lectures in Music Studies: YuHao Chen, The Ohio State University

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, western missionaries played a central role in recording Chinese word-sounds in phonetic writing. As traditional Chinese writing challenged western script models, early missionaries turned to the Latin alphabet to phonetically transcribe the local language and disseminate Christian literature. Starting in the 1870s, however, missionaries in China began drawing on unconventional script designs — such ...