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Inventor of Pinyin Dies


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Hard to imagine what went before, though the article describes it. Also mentions that, though it's invention was already of global and historic proportions, pinyin made Chinese character input possible on computing systems. And, of course, since he was competent while Mao was alive, he had to be sent to a labor camp, too. Excerpts below:

 

[ Link here ]

Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, Dies at 111

 

Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.

In recent decades, with the comparative invincibility that he felt great age bestowed on him, Mr. Zhou was also an outspoken critic of the Chinese government.

“What are they going to do,” he asked bluntly in an interview with the BBC in 2012. “Come and take me away?”

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....Pinyin (the name can be translated as “spelled sounds”) has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.

It is to Pinyin that we owe now-ubiquitous spellings like Beijing, which supplanted the earlier Peking; Chongqing, which replaced Chungking; Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse-tung; and thousands of others. The system was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization in 1982 and by the United Nations in 1986.

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Pinyin is not to replace Chinese characters; it is a help to Chinese characters,” Mr. Zhou explained in the interview with The Guardian. “Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear.”

As a result, illiteracy remained rampant throughout China well into the 20th century — affecting, by some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the population. It was also inordinately hard for foreigners to learn to read the language.

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In 1969, the government labeled Mr. Zhou a “reactionary academic authority” and exiled him to a labor camp in the Ningxia region of north-central China, where he worked the rice fields. He spent more than two years there.

On returning home, he continued writing about language, culture and contemporary affairs. In the 1980s, he helped oversee the translation into Chinese of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mr. Zhou was the author of more than 40 books, some of them banned in China and a good 10 of them published after he turned 100.

In his occasional interviews with the Western news media from his modest apartment in Beijing, Mr. Zhou was openly critical both of revolutionary-era Chinese Communism (“In all honesty I haven’t got anything good to say about Mao Zedong,” he told Agence France-Presse in 2015) and of the economic reforms of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping.

“Chinese people becoming rich isn’t important,” he said in the same interview. “Human progress is ultimately progress towards democracy.”

 

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It's been relatively recently that Pinyin was commonly taught in schools - my wife still doesn't know it. As a result, I get to help out with our grandson's homework when they use it.

 

If I need to know a specific Chinese character, I can often find it through my cell phone's PlecoDict Chinese dictionaries, but sometimes I'll get her help - I input (as Pinyin) what I hear. After seeing the Chinese characters that gets, she'll adjust her pronunciation until I get it right.

 

After our grandson was born, we had to sit down at the computer for about 10 minutes to figure out what his name was. I had THOUGHT it was Tensi (she had even VERIFIED that pronumciation) - it turned out that it was 晨曦 (Chenxi).

 

She uses character recognition for input - either touch on her cell phone, or with a writing pad on her computer. She still has to select the character from a list of possibilities, but almost always gets the first one, even when entered in her own handwriting.

 

For speed, you need a system that IDENTIFIES the character without choosing from a list. I think Wubi is the preferred method, with typists achieving speeds approaching that of Western languages.

 

From Wikipedia -

Chinese input methods for computers

 

The Wubi method is based on the structure of characters rather than their pronunciation, making it possible to input characters even when the user does not know the pronunciation, as well as not being too closely linked to any particular spoken variety of Chinese. It is also extremely efficient: every character can be written with at most 4 keystrokes. In practice, most characters can be written with fewer. There are reports of experienced typists reaching 160 characters per minute with Wubi. What this means in the context of Chinese is not entirely the same as it is for English, but it is true that Wubi is extremely fast when used by an experienced typist. The main reason for this is that, unlike with traditional phonetic input methods, one does not have to spend time selecting the desired character from a list of homophonic possibilities: virtually all characters have a unique representation.

 

 

 

One thing the Pinyin system will alleviate is problems due to regional accents - “Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear.” For example, Jiaying tends to pronounce 'sh' sounds as 's'

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To my way of thinking, the biggest problem with the Chinese characters is that kids generally don't learn to read until they're in school, although they catch up pretty fast, since they have FAR fewer characters to learn than we do words. From what I understand, 2000 characters represents a newspaper level of literacy

 

 

https://www.quora.com/How-is-a-native-Chinese-child-taught-to-read-Chinese

How many characters do most children know at age 7, 8, 9, etc?

According to this national syllabus, students should be able to read and write the following number of characters:

  • Grade 1-2: Read 1600, write 800;
  • Grade 3-4: Read 2500, write 1600;
  • Grade 5-6: Read 3000, write 2500;
  • Grade 7-9: Read/write 3500.

 

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