Posted on 01/14/2017 4:59:45 PM PST by nickcarraway
Zhou Youguang, the inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died Saturday at the age of 111. Since his system was introduced nearly six decades ago, few innovations have done more to boost literacy rates in China and bridge the divide between the country and the West.
Pinyin, which was adopted by China in 1958, gave readers unfamiliar with Chinese characters a crucial tool to understand how to pronounce them. These characters do not readily disclose information on how to say them aloud — but with such a system as Pinyin, those characters more easily and clearly yield their meaning when converted into languages like English and Spanish, which use the Roman alphabet.
While it was not the first system to Romanize Chinese, Pinyin has become the most widely accepted. For Chinese speakers, many of whom speak disparate dialects, its broad acceptance made education easier, giving instructors a single, relatively simple instrument to teach people how to read.
Beyond China's borders, Pinyin allowed the standardization of Chinese names. For instance, it's a big reason why the name Westerners commonly use for the Chinese capital shifted from "Peking" to "Beijing." And it's why many other such names changed dramatically along with it.
And yet Zhou, the man behind one of the most important linguistic innovations in the 20th century, said he was reluctant when asked by the Chinese government to take on the task in the mid-1950s.
At the time, he was an economic scholar, only recently returned to China after a stint working on Wall Street in the U.S. He had come back to the country after its 1949 Communist revolution.
"I said I was an amateur, a layman, I couldn't do the job," he told NPR in 2011, laughing. "But they said, it's a new job, everybody is an amateur. Everybody urged me to change professions, so I did. So from 1955, I abandoned economics and started studying writing systems."
Zhou (shown here in New York in 1947) worked on Wall Street, but he returned to China in 1949 after the Communist revolution. Less than a decade after this photo was taken, he went to work on the system that would become Pinyin. Courtesy Zhou Youguang The committee Zhou led spent three years working on its alphabetic system.
"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.
Others took the committee's invention very seriously, however. The Communist government of China introduced Pinyin in schools in 1958. The international community eventually adopted it as the standard romanization for Chinese writing, as well, with the U.N. doing so in 1986.
Before Pinyin, 85 percent of Chinese people could not read, according to the BBC. Now, UNICEF says the literacy rate in China hovers at about 95 percent.
Lately, Pinyin has also been integral in determining the ways mobile phones and computers transmit Chinese characters.
Still, despite the broad acceptance of his system, Zhou went on to become something of a thorn in the side of the country's Communist government. During the Cultural Revolution, in the '60s and '70s, Zhou drew the scrutiny of the Communist Party. In 1969, he was even labeled a "reactionary academic authority" and exiled to a labor camp for more than two years, reports The New York Times.
But he was not dissuaded from speaking his mind for long. As he aged, he became more vocal about his dissatisfaction with the powers that be.
And, as Louisa Lim noted for NPR, Zhou was not afraid to use his stature to point out discrepancies he found in Communist Party doctrine.
"In 1985, he translated the Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese and then worked on the second edition — placing him in a position to notice the U-turns in China's official line. At the time of the original translation, China's position was that the U.S. started the Korean War — but the encyclopedia said North Korea was to blame, Zhou recalls. " 'That was troublesome, so we didn't include that bit. Later, the Chinese view changed. So we got permission from above to include it. That shows there's progress in China,' he says, adding, 'But it's too slow.' " For a man born in 1906, under China's final dynasty, Zhou did more than most to help encourage the change he wished to see in his country. Though he died Saturday after more than a century of life, he is survived by the system he helped father, which continues to live on around the world.
Clarification: This post has been updated to make clearer the fact that Pinyin was not the first system of Romanization.
“inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet...”
Huh?
Writers can’t write anymore.
(Interesting topic, thnx FR post by the way)
“While it was not the first system to Romanize Chinese,”
That’s right, even though the article sets the premise to make it seem that it was.
Pinyin is probably the best. Others rely a lot of apostrophes so it gets messy.
And this article has some propaganda it, eg how the literacy rate has gone way up. That has nothing to do with pinyin. Literacy rate has been high in Hong Kong and Taiwan without pinyin.
And the key to his longevity is...
The account leaves out a more sinister motive for the PRC regime adopting Pinyin - it would allow those who could still read traditional Chinese to die off, thus cutting off future generations from centuries of Chinese literature, philosophy, and even art, leaving only Maoist doctrine as the basis of all knowledge. Confucian thought was a main target.
Didn’t work out that way, but during the Cultural Revolution eradicating the pre-communist past was a primary goal.
Look up the “Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius” movement of the last days of Mao Tse-tung. The past was the class enemy.
I actually think it is more difficult to use than the older Wade-Giles (which wasn’t perfect, either).
Beyond China’s borders, Pinyin allowed the standardization of Chinese names. For instance, it’s a big reason why the name Westerners commonly use for the Chinese capital shifted from “Peking” to “Beijing.” …Peking is the older Postal Romanization, based on although not exactly like Wade-Giles (in which China’s capital is spelled Pei-ching) which the West was using prior to CPC-approved Pinyin.
Most interesting article.
Interesting.
I have thought Pinyin better, mainly due to not using apostrophes.
Zhuyin (mopobofo) is said to be best, but I never memorized the phonetic symbols.
It’s a shame that they changed to only simplified characters.
Chinese people now don’t even know Chinese.
“Pinyin is a sign of the CPC’s influence moving unduly beyond its borders and infiltrating other cultures”
That is what I’ve found worst about it. I like pinyin, but didn’t like that aspect of it.
But simplified characters is worse.
“Hsi Chin-p’ing”
Yeah. I used to like doing stuff like that. Just to bug the early 50 centers.
For example Chiang tse-min for Jiang Zemin.
As far as Wades Pinyin and other romanizations. To some degree they romanization also reflects slight regional accent variations.
And in the US, public schools are now teaching “sight words” instead of the alphabet.
These days when I learn a new character I often render it into GR, a very underrated system.
Mr. Zhou, someone who liked economics and philology, was a man after my own heart.
Thanks.
I never learned much about GR, it sounds interesting.
Mr Zhou does sound like a good fellow.
Yeah.
It changed overnight with pinyin implementation.
It’s an improvement over Wade Giles with its apostrophes and where everything is spelled with “ch”. The “q”s and “x”s are weird at first, but one gets used to them.
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