拼音是谁发明的?
Who invented pinyin? The story of Zhou Youguang
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 往往 | wángwǎng | often; frequently; usually |
| 毕业 | bìyè | to graduate; graduation |
| 进入 | jìnrù | to enter; to get into |
| 待 | dāi | when; once (待…后) |
| 当 | dāng | when; at the time of |
| 拼音 | pīnyīn | pinyin (romanization of Chinese) |
| 套 | tào | cover; case; sheath (as in 手套) |
| 派 | pài | to send; to dispatch |
| 政府 | zhèngfǔ | government |
| 认 | rèn | to recognize; to know (as in 认得) |
| 调 | diào | to adjust; to tune |
| 业余 | yèyú | amateur |
English (for the teacher)
Anyone learning Chinese usually starts on day one not with characters but with pinyin: b, p, m, f, and those four little tone marks. Today pinyin is everywhere, from primary school textbooks to the input methods on our phones. But did you know? The man who led its design was, of all things, a banker who had worked on Wall Street.
His name was Zhou Youguang, and he was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, in 1906. As a young man he studied economics, and after graduating he went into finance. In 1946 his bank sent him to New York, and he spent some time on Wall Street. After 1949 he went back to Shanghai and taught economics at Fudan University. If not for one unexpected transfer, he would probably have stayed an economist all his life.
That transfer came in 1955. At the time a great many people in China could not read, and the government wanted a more effective way to help everyone learn characters and speak Mandarin. Premier Zhou Enlai remembered that Zhou Youguang had been very interested in language and writing when he was young, so he moved him to Beijing to work on script reform. Zhou Youguang demurred that he was only an amateur, but the answer he got was: “This is a new job; everybody is an amateur.”
Zhou and his colleagues spent about three years on it. They compared all the earlier schemes for spelling Chinese with letters, and in the end chose the world's most common alphabet, the Latin one, plus four tone marks. In 1958 the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet was officially adopted. From then on pinyin went into primary school classrooms: children learned pinyin first, then used it to learn characters. In 1982 it also became an international standard, and that is where the “Beijing” printed on foreign maps today comes from.
People call him the “father of pinyin”, but he himself was always modest and said this bit of work hardly mattered. Even more amazing was his old age: after turning a hundred he published more than ten books. On his 109th birthday he joked at his own expense: “God is too busy; he has forgotten me.” In January 2017, the day after his 111th birthday, Zhou Youguang died in Beijing.
Next time you type 你好 in pinyin on your phone, spare a thought for this old man who came back from Wall Street. It was the letters and tones he and his colleagues designed that made the world of Chinese characters easier to enter for countless people.