From Amarynth,
I don’t know what the Chinese folks think, but I am grateful!
Pinyin birthday celebrated in China.
February 11 marks the birthday of Pinyin (拼音 pīnyīn), a system of romanization for the Chinese language. It was adopted in 1958.
Since 1979, it has been used worldwide as the official Latin transcription of Chinese names and titles.
The Pinyin system has been approved by the International Standardization Organization as the main Latin transcription of the Chinese language. It is the main method of entering Chinese characters on most digital devices.
The inventor of Pinyin, Zhou Youguang (周有光), was born in Jiangsu Province during the last Chinese Qing Dynasty. He initially chose the field of economics: he worked on Wall Street and in the City of London. Linguistics was his hobby.
Later, the authorities persuaded him to leave economics and study Chinese writing. He continued to work in Beijing in the committee for the reform of the Chinese language.
Zhou is also known as a long-lived person: he lived to be 111 years old and died in 2017.
Amarynth @ https://sovereignista.com
Mobo Gao’s pithy reply,
My understanding is that the Director of the Pinyin Plan Committee was Wu Yuzhang and the Director of the approval committee was Guo Moruo. Zhou was only one of the Planning committee members. Zhou was an economist while the plan was drawn up by linguists. Zhou got the limelight, in my understanding, for three reasons. One is that he published something supporting a pinyin plan when there was opposition. The other reason is that he lived the longest to claim credit. The third reason is more important: Zhou, just before his passing away, was very vocal in his criticism of the Chinese government and voiced his dissent in media outlets in Hong Kong. It was political convenient to raise Zhou’s intellectual status and credit to call him the father of pinyin while his contribution to economics was virtually nothing.
Best, Mobo @ https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/mobo.gao
Further reading
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