Who invented pinyin

As the Chinese government aimed to boost literacy throughout the country, he was drafted to lead the committee in developing an alphabetic system in Everybody urged me to change professions, so I did.

So from , I abandoned economics and started studying writing systems. Since his prosecution by the authorities during the Cultural Revolution in , Zhou, who received Western education at St.

Zhou was an outspoken critic of the Chinese government in his later years. Today, the romanization system is the first step for Chinese schoolchildren and foreign students around the world to learn the most widely spoken language on the planet.

But Zhou insisted that he was just continuing an orthographic tradition that went back at early as the Qing Dynasty. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect. Already a subscriber? Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

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Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content Pinyin was adopted by China in Zhou Youguang in the s. Alternatives considered include cyrillic, Japanese alphabet, or a new Chinese alphabet based on shapes of characters. Mr Zhou argued for the roman alphabet, to better connect China with the outside world.

Singapore introduced the system in schools in the early s, around the same time that the Speak Mandarin Campaign was started in Taiwan adopted it in , replacing a made-in-Taiwan system called tongyong pinyin.

It is also accepted by the the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions. It is now a useful tool for entering Chinese-language text on computers. Communist leader Mao Zedong once said that China would have to abandon characters altogether for the masses to fully participate in society.

During the movement to simplify Chinese in the s, some proposed that Chinese characters be dropped, but it was never implemented. Now, as more people use pinyin and other phonetic systems to write Chinese on electronic devices, some are questioning if the ancient system of writing will die a natural death.

In a 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 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. The man who helped 'simplify' Chinese.

Chinese paper's sweary New Year puzzle. The words that ruled the Chinese internet in When Chinese children forget how to write. Image source, Getty Images.