At the end of the Ming Dynasty, western missionaries came to China to preach. In order to learn Chinese characters, they began to spell Chinese with Latin letters.

1605, Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary (1552-10), wrote four articles by using a set of plans made by him and several other missionaries to annotate Chinese characters with Roman characters, and sent them to the ink-making experts at that time, who compiled the book Cheng Mo Yuan.

This is the earliest publication that uses Latin alphabet to phonetic Chinese characters, which is a little later than Xiaojing, which uses Arabic alphabet to pinyin Chinese characters. Xiaojing (also known as Xiao Er Jing and Xiao Er Jin) is probably the first attempt to pinyin Chinese characters with alphabetic characters.

There are no pinyin letters in our country, so we annotate Chinese characters with orthography or anticlockwise. Direct pronunciation means using homophones to express the pronunciation of Chinese characters. If homophones are rare words, they can't be read even if they are pronounced. Backcutting refers to annotating another Chinese character with two Chinese characters. The upper word is the same as the initial consonant of the annotated word, and the lower word is the same as the vowel and tone of the annotated word. Mr. Zhou Youguang called reverse cutting "center cutting welding method". These two methods of phonetic notation are inconvenient to use.

Chinese Pinyin is also an internationally recognized modern standard for Latin transliteration of Chinese. The international standard ISO 7098 (Chinese Roman alphabet spelling) writes: "The Chinese Pinyin Scheme officially adopted by the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (1958 February 1 1) is used for spelling Chinese. The author records the pronunciation of Chinese characters in Mandarin. "

References:

Baidu encyclopedia-hanyu pinyin