综合一区欧美国产,99国产麻豆免费精品,九九精品黄色录像,亚洲激情青青草,久久亚洲熟妇熟,中文字幕av在线播放,国产一区二区卡,九九久久国产精品,久久精品视频免费

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語Fran?ais
China
Home / China / Society

Father of pinyin writing system dies at 111

By WANG KAIHAO | China Daily | Updated: 2017-01-16 06:28

Zhou Youguang, a linguist considered the father of pinyin, a system of Latin letters for reading and writing standard Chinese, died on Saturday at his home in Beijing at age 111, one day after his birthday.

In 1955, Zhou, then an economics professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, was asked by the central government to quit his job and join a national committee to develop an accessible alphabetic writing system.

It took him and his colleagues three years to devise the official Romanization system, which was adopted in 1958. Since then, pinyin — which can be translated as "spelled sounds" — has helped to considerably increase literacy across the country, and has made it easier for foreigners to study the Chinese language. It also has facilitated the use of Chinese characters on computer keyboards and cellphones: pinyin is entered on a keyboard, and users are given a choice of characters.

"The committee's work was extremely important to establishing a modern country because about 85 percent of Chinese people were illiterate when New China was founded," Zhou recalled in one of his many reference books.

He later lectured at Peking University and Renmin University of China on linguistics.

In the early 1980s, Zhou participated in a successful campaign proposing pinyin as the international standard spelling for Chinese. It is considered superior to the Wade-Giles system, developed in the 19th century and widely used until the 1980s. Zhou also worked with other scholars to translate the Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese.

"Mr Zhou is a great scholar whose knowledge has spread from East to West," said Su Peicheng, a linguistic professor at Peking University. "He is the founder of the theory of modern learning for the Chinese language."

Zhou was born in 1906 in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, and in 1923 enrolled at the prestigious St John's University in Shanghai. There, he majored in economics and also took courses in linguistics.

In 1933 he went to Japan to further his economics studies, but returned to Shanghai two years later when Sino-Japanese ties became tense. After World War II ended, he worked as a banker in the United States, but in 1949, he chose to return to China shortly after New China was founded.

He joked about his longevity on his birthday in 2013: "God is so busy. He has forgotten me."

Zhou was married for nearly 70 years to Zhang Yunhe, who came from a legendary literary family in Hefei, Anhui province. Zhang died in 2002 at age 94. The couple had a daughter who died as a child and a son, Zhou Xiaoping, a meteorologist, who died in 2015 at age 82.

Zhou Youguang, linguist, began work on devising pinyin in 1955.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's picks
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
 
潮安县| 宁乡县| 会理县| 全州县| 乾安县| 台州市| 文水县| 清水河县| 金昌市| 海盐县| 皋兰县| 万盛区| 肇庆市| 莫力| 大宁县| 邵东县| 榆树市| 马鞍山市| 安仁县| 曲沃县| 屏东市| 蓬莱市| 永城市| 大姚县| 雷州市| 三台县| 汪清县| 塘沽区| 内丘县| 额敏县| 青浦区| 石阡县| 姚安县| 潜江市| 呼玛县| 镇安县| 稷山县| 宁化县| 宜宾县| 佛坪县| 七台河市|