Zhou Youguang, Creator of Pinyin, Passes Away at Age 111

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The state media of China reported that Zhou Youguang, the creator of Pinyin, the official Standard Chinese Romanization system passed away on Saturday at his Beijing residence. He was 111 years old. He was a linguist and in recent years a very outspoken critic of his country’s government.

Pinyin

Zhou Youguang, who many people called the Father of Pinyin, said that he was the “son of Pinyin” rather than the father because there were many people before him who worked on various systems to make the Chinese language available and accessible to more people. Pinyin was created around the 1950s at the instigation of the Chinese government so that literacy would increase. After its final creation, it was published in 1958. Revised a number of times, Pinyin is now the Standard Chinese that is used in mainland China, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia. Pinyin is the system used for teaching Standard Chinese for students learning the language.

In 1982, the ISO or the International Organization for Standardization officially recognized Pinyin as an international standard. Taiwan adopted it in 2009. It was also adopted by several international institutions, including the American Library Association, the U.S. Library of Congress, the Singapore Government and the United Nations.

Pinyin has four diacritics to indicate the tones. “Spelled sounds” is its literal meaning.

Zhou Youguang

The super-centenarian was born on January 13, 1906 in the province of Jiangsu. He was the son of an official of the Qing Dynasty. He showed interest in linguistics when he was still in high school but he majored in economics in college. He did take supplementary courses in linguistics. He worked for a bank before joining government service. He was stationed in several overseas branches of his bank in several cities outside China. He remained overseas until Communism took over his homeland is 1949.

He thought China would have every opportunity to develop, but he was later disillusioned, which turned him into one of the government’s biggest critics. He joined the economic faculty at Fudan University and taught there for a few years. At that time, the government was deliberating on making Mandarin as the national language in China. The government also wanted to promote literacy throughout the country.

Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the newly formed People’s Republic of China, knew that linguistics was a hobby for Zhou Youguang. The premier asked him to join the committee to develop a Chinese alphabetic system. Despite arguing that he was an amateur, Youguang became the head of the committee.

It took them three years to create Pinyin, which is a guide to pronunciation rather than writing. They based their work on the existing transliteration systems that were already available. It was adopted by the Chinese government in February 1958 and was widely accepted.

Many would think that it’s going to make Youguang’s name a household word. That did not happen and when the Cultural Revolution started, he was in fact one of those literati that were sent to the countryside to be re-educated. He stayed at a labor camp for more than two years and after his release he wrote extensively about contemporary affairs, culture and language that included his critical observations of the government. He helped in the translation of the Encyclopedia Britannica into Chinese in the 1980s.

Up to the time before he died, he remained uncelebrated in his homeland despite his contribution to the Chinese language that made it easier for foreigners to learn Chinese. Pinyin enabled the blind to read Chinese in Braille and aided the quick entry of the Chinese language into cellphones and computer keyboards.