The Daily Insight.

Connected.Informed.Engaged.

news

Is there a Bible in Mandarin?

By Michael Gray

Is there a Bible in Mandarin?

The Bible used by most Chinese Protestants today, known as the Chinese Union Version (CUV), is the vernacular translation. The Revised Chinese Union Version of the Bible, which made tweaks to the original CUV, was completed only a few years ago in 2010, and was consecrated at St John’s Cathedral in Hong Kong that year.

Is Pinyin and Mandarin the same?

First, Mandarin refers to a whole language dialect and is the standard dialect for Chinese. Pinyin is just the romanization of the pronunciation of Chinese.

Can you learn Mandarin with pinyin?

Actually, you cannot. In modern China, you mainly see traditional hanzi characters. Pinyin is a tool for learning the language. Without it, you would have to learn the language completely by ear.

Is Pinyin real Chinese?

Hanyu Pinyin (simplified Chinese: 汉语拼音; traditional Chinese: 漢語拼音; pinyin: hànyǔ pīnyīn), often abbreviated to pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in mainland China and to some extent in Taiwan and Singapore.

Who translated the Bible into Mandarin?

Archimandrite Gury
The first translation was done by Archimandrite Gury (Karpov), head of the 14th Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing (1858-1864). He commenced translation work from the Slavonic in 1859, completing a draft after four years.

Do Chinese read Bible?

Among China’s major religions — which include Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and folk beliefs — Christianity is the only one whose major holy text cannot be sold through normal commercial channels. The Bible is printed in China but legally available only at church bookstores.

What was used before pinyin?

French EFEO system. The system devised in 1902 by Séraphin Couvreur of the École française d’Extrême-Orient was used in most of the French-speaking world to transliterate Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, then gradually replaced by hanyu pinyin.

Why Pinyin is different from English?

→ Chinese uses characters, which cannot be sounded out, while English words use the alphabet, which allows the speaker to sound out the word because it is a phonetic language. Pinyin uses romanized letters, but the sound associated with each is unique to Pinyin.

Is pinyin easier to learn?

The fact is: it’s much easier to learn to read and write characters once you already know the sound and meaning of the words. Once you start learning characters, pinyin becomes just a pronunciation hint to help recognize the characters. That way you’ll learn the language as a native speaker does.

When was the Chinese Bible written?

A Chinese New Version was published in 1992 and a Revised Chinese Union Version in the early twenty-first century. The Studium Biblicum Version, now the standard Chinese Bible for Catholics, was started in the 1930s and published in 1968.

Who wrote the Chinese Bible?

The first Catholic Chinese Bible to be published was started by a young Franciscan friar named Gabriele Allegra, who began translating the Old Testament from the original Hebrew and Aramaic languages in 1935, completing the first draft of the Old Testament in 1944.