China’s Zhou Youguang, father of Pinyin writing system, dies aged 111
Zhou Youguang was born is 1906 during the Qing Dynasty
Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang, who created the writing system that turns Chinese characters into words using letters from the Roman alphabet, has died aged 111.
Mr Zhou and a Communist party committee spent three years developing the Pinyin system in the 1950s.
It changed the way the language was taught and helped raise literacy rates.
Mr Zhou, who was born in 1906 during the Qing Dynasty, later became a fierce critic of China’s communist rulers.
He died in Beijing on Saturday a day after his birthday, Chinese media reported.
As a young man Mr Zhou spent time in the US and worked as a Wall Street banker.
He returned to China after the communist victory in 1949 and was put in charge of creating a new writing system using the Roman alphabet.
“We spent three years developing Pinyin. People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just 26 letters,” he told the BBC in 2012.
Pinyin is now used to teach Chinese around the world Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can.
Pinyin has since become the most commonly used system globally, although some Chinese communities - particularly in Hong Kong and Taiwan - continue to use alternatives.
It is also widely used to type Chinese characters on computers and smartphones, leading some to fear it could end up replacing Chinese characters altogether.
The achievement protected Mr Zhou from some of the persecution that took place under former leader Mao Zedong.
However, he was later sent to the countryside for re-education during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
In his later years he became strongly critical of the Chinese authorities and wrote a number of books, most of which were banned.
In a 2011 interview with NPR he said he hoped he would live long enough to see the Chinese authorities admit that the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had been a mistake.
He said ordinary people no longer believed in the Communist Party, and that the vast majority of Chinese intellectuals were in favour of democracy.
An interesting guy. I’ve heard that Hanyu Pinyin had closer ties to Russian pronunciation than, say, to English–which would make sense given the geopolitics of the 1950s. Is there anything to this?
How can Chinese pronunciation be closer to Russian pronounciation over English pronunciation? It is still Chinese pronunciation, just written in Roman letters, not Chinese characters.
They were going to drop Chinese characters alltogether and move to one of the alphabets, Cyrylic or Latin. The Mongolians chose Russian alphabet and gave up their script altogether. Later the Vietnamese did the same but opted for Latin alphabet.
It was Stalin who told Mao that they should keep their own characters because of the long history and national pride.
Oh, and how can you possibly attribute higher literacy rates to pinyin not wider access to public education?
100 years ago many Europeans couldn’t read or write either, is it because they didn’t have pinyin?
Teachers in primary schools teach pinyin to kids these days because of the computers and mobile phones and written messages to kids before they are able to read characters, but nobody ever uses pinyin in the country apart from the toilets and cafeterias in primary schools.
Older generation does not know pinyin at all and they can read and write in characters better than many young undereducated functional illiterates. Who stayed school for 10 or 12 years.
I remembered: these days they actually use pinyin in mainland in primary school textbooks so the kids can memorize better which chracter stands for which syllable. It does make them learn faster. but it doesnt mean that pinyin can be directly attributed to the rise in literacy because they have to learn traditional characters anyway, with pinyin or not.