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Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died
- mcguire 10y agoFor anyone interested in the topic, a couple good books are: * Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction by Chaofen Sun, and * The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
- grabcocque 10y agoHe saw his eleventy-first birthday? That's a rather curious number and a very respectable age for a human.
- paulpauper 10y agoonly about 1500 suerentinarians are thought to have been documented in history, most of whom were women. being male is really rare..maybe only a hundred total out off 50 billion people who have ever lived...
- chinhodado 10y agoInterestingly your comment is the only google result for "suerentinarians"
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoThe easiest way to live to be over 100 is, to use your father's birth certificate. Pretty common, and easy to pull off because there's nobody else alive who can contradict you.
- mtw 10y ago111 years old would made him amongst the top 5 oldest men living on earth ... or at least yesterday, before he died
- Chia 10y agoR.I.P.
- WouterZ 10y agoI was taught pinyin at Chinese university - too bad the Chinese textbooks didn't include the genesis of pinyin - interesting, R.I.P.
- jason_slack 10y agoI am taking Mandarin classes and our textbook has both pinyin and characters for almost everything. There is always a section in each chapter that is entirely in characters. I have been buying books on Amazon to help accelerate my reading. I need a story to follow along with. These book indeed do not have any pinyin. Pinyin is fascinating to think about. Sometimes words are created from pinyin when you say them. Example: New York is Niǔyuē (纽约). Another is how in English we say "ha, ha". In pinyin it has been adopted exactly that way: Hāhā (哈哈).
- aaron-lebo 10y agoVery cool. I noticed an interesting quote in the article: Before Pinyin was developed, 85% of Chinese people could not read, now almost all can. While the literacy rate used to be 15% and is now 95%, that means that there are still 54 million illiterate people in the country. Obviously nothing wrong with the quote and it is at least in spirit correct, but it's interesting how vague language can be. Edit: while looking for those numbers, came across this which is a bit dated now (2001), but gives more insight into the situation there: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneven-march-to-literacy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/chinas-long-but-uneve... According to Wang Dai, an official with the ministry's Illiteracy Elimination Office, literacy rates stand uniformly near the 95 percent level in the nation's major cities, and throughout its more prosperous coastal region. In China's less developed western region, however, there remains much to be done. The problem is especially acute in areas populated by non-Chinese ethnic minorities, such as Tibet, where illiteracy rates today run as high as 42 percent. Nationwide, there are still 30 million Chinese between the ages of 15 and 50 who cannot read at all. Adding in all those defined as "semi-literate" and those, like Hua Lijun, who are above 50, the total approaches 150 million. About 70 percent of all illiterate Chinese are women. The largest gains against illiteracy were made in the 1950s and 1960s when the government made good on its promises to provide at least basic education throughout much of the country.
- imjustsaying 10y agoCommunist China is really good at massaging statistics to make things look better than they actually are. Significant numbers of people in modern China can barely communicate to each other about complex ideas in Mandarin (several hundred million are 2nd language speakers or quasi 1st-language speakers). Someone reading faulty pinyin and making a barely-comprehensible sounds might count as literacy in fluffy government surveys commissioned to show progress, but in reality being able to read pinyin does not mean someone can read in the way you or I understand it. If you need to understand the meaning of something written in Chinese, you must see the Chinese character. Just because you can read the pinyin pronunciation doesn't mean you understand what's being said. Being able to produce sounds is not literacy - there's high amounts of ambiguity. For example, reading Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shí shì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shí shì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì. Does not tell you the actual the meaning of 石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。 氏時時適市視獅。 十時，適十獅適市。 是時，適施氏適市。 氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。 氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。 石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。 石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。 食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。 試釋是事。 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... Another story entirely is the idea of adding "Simplified" Chinese characters. Now people who want to be seriously literate have to learn an additional set of characters. But I digress. For another example of massaging statistics to show progress, notice how when a comparison of "China's educational progress!" is made to the West, a place like Shanghai - whose school district is among the best if not the best in the entire country - is often then compared to the national average of other countries as if one were somehow representative of the other.
- wodenokoto 10y ago> "We spent three years developing Pinyin. People made fun of > us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just > 26 letters" I actually think it is quite fast. Grasping an entire languages phonology is a huge accomplishment and condensing it to its bare minimum is also impressive. With that said, I must admit I don't know how pinyin relates to other phonetic systems such as the Bopomofo[0] or Wade-Giles[1] and for all I know it might just be the exact same system with different letters. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles
- em3rgent0rdr 10y agoPinyin is a little more compact (I.e. fewer Roman characters per Chinese characters) than Wades-Giles, so more efficient storage. That makes it easier to input chinese characters when using an English keyboard (or keypad on a mobile phone).
- emodendroket 10y agoIt's also arguably more aligned with the English pronunciation of the letters.
- FabHK 10y agoNot for initials (consonants): I find Wade-Giles ch'in more evocative than the Pinyin qin, and similarly hsüan vs xuan, and even tzŭ vs zi and tzʻŭ vs ci. Wade-Giles you basically have to learn not to ignore the apostrophe, Pinyin you have to learn most of the initials. Though the Wade-Giles jih vs Pinyin ri is a bit of a toss-up. For finals, I find Wade-Giles yü more consistent than Pinyin yu, but Wade-Giles to less descriptive than Pinyin duo. But then, it's shorter. So, yeah, "arguably" :-)
- uranusjr 10y agoNot a all. As a phonetic enthusiast I can assure you Pinyin is by far the worst representing Chinese sounds with English letters. It is made to represent Chinese phonetic, but its creators are seemingly completely ignorant toward basic phonetic rules, such as voicing and aspiration, and how words actually sound in English. As an example, b in English is called an unaspirated voiced consonant, which means you vibrate your vocal folds, but send only a little breath when you sound it. You can compare it with p, its aspirated voiceless counterpart, for which you do not vibrate the vocal folds (voiceless), but sends a strong breath through your month (aspirated). Chinese does not have most voiced consonants present in English, so Pinyin naively uses b (also d and some others) to represent voiceless aspirated consonants, which does not sound like a b, but more like p in “spade”. This results in most of the foreigners learning Chinese with Pinyin bringing English pronunciation when they speak, and makes them sound way too stiff and thus awkward. Wade-Giles, in comparison, is much more systematic, and does a much better job hinting speakers with European (especially Germanic language) background to sound more correctly. Bopomofo does not have this problem, as it basically invents a new set of scripts. Pinyin probably lets you pick up casual speaking Chinese most quickly, but beyond that, it’s a curse. [Edit]: Voice “folds” not cords, sorry. Also fixed some typos.
- imjustsaying 10y agopinyin is not nearly as good as zhuyin in regards to phonetic representation. as one example, some words like pinyin's /zhun/ look like they should have one syllable, but there's actually two, as far as i can tell. or at the least, the schwa is definitely missing from the pinyin representation, as in, it's not /zhu@n/, where @ is the schwa. pinyin is rife with oversights like this, that a learner has no idea about, and indeed instructional guides don't even mention much of the time. if you're serious about learning chinese, don't use pinyin unless you want to spend extra time undoing the damage done by doing so.
- PutinIsEvil 10y agoSorry can you please elaborate? When I see 我, Wǒ. What do you propose I should do?
- yichi 10y agoI'm against Pinyin for the same reason as why I'm against using Romaji for learning Japanese. Pinyin and Romaji uses latin alphabet for representing sounds in a foreign language and if you are a native English speaker like most of us on HN, it's really bad because your brain will try to associate your knowledge of English with Pinyin you are reading. If you use Zhuyin for Chinese, or the Kana system for Japanese, you are telling your brain to start learning the phonetic system from scratch, which makes learning Chinese or Japanese a lot easier phonetically at least.
- ionforce 10y agoAre you opposed to using it as a learning device to help bootstrap? Or are you referring more to its long-term, continued use? Or its use at all?
- yichi 10y agoI'm opposed to using it for beginners who aren't familiar with the phonetic system of the language. Once you learned the phonetic system properly, and you know the character's in Romaji and Pinyin don't represent the sound you know in English, of course it's then helpful for learning how to type Japanese or Chinese. Don't get me wrong, Romaji has useful purposes, such as representing place names in Japan for foreigners, etc. But as a learning device for learning Japanese, it's not a very good one.
- forgingahead 10y agoInteresting facts about pinyin and Simplified Mandarin -- Mao and his cadres were interested in spreading the gospel of Communism, but with high illiteracy rates, people were generally not as susceptible to propaganda. Both initiatives, pinyin and Simplification, were designed to more easily bring literacy rates up, for the purpose of spreading Communist teachings. So you invent an essentially new language, make it accessible via Roman letters to even non-Chinese people, and all documentation and literature produced in that new language talks about the glory of the CCP. Pretty brilliant (if sinister).
- hgfdhjtyd 10y agoSilly revisionism. You think Mao engaged in a national literacy program for the sole purpose of inculcate people with Communist propaganda? I don't think so. That's equivalent to saying Hitler built railroads solely so people could get to Nazi party gatherings and transport Jews to camps. It's possible for Mao to simultaneously be a disastrous autocrat who committed atrocities and to have engaged in projects of national and economic development. Some of them were debacles. Others, like pinyin for Romanization and simplification of writing, were complete successes. Do you know anything about Chinese? What "new language" are you talking about? Simplified characters and pinyin are not new languages. The persistence of traditional characters in Hong Kong/Taiwan or diaspora doesn't say anything about the success of simplified characters, which brought literacy to over a billion in the Chinese mainland. I have some personal experience in this matter; I do not have a natural aptitude for foreign language learning. I learned oral Mandarin as a second language as as a child. I was taught reading and writing Chinese with traditional characters and with Zhuyin/bopomofo (still used in Taiwan, at least until recently), not Romanization. I studied Chinese in college, learning introductory written Chinese again with simplified characters and pinyin. My personal experience as a native English speaker was that pinyin and simplified characters were substantially easier to get to a functional level of literacy level. It's not really rocket science, just from a human memory perspective, simplified characters have many fewer strokes and radicals, and many homonymous characters are united so there are fewer of them. This also makes keyboard entry somewhat faster and makes smaller characters legible on displays (or even in print). I'm not arguing that simplified characters necessarily reduce the effort in achieving a very high level of literacy, but for basic literacy, simplified writing/spelling systems are effective.
- creaghpatr 10y agoI learned Chinese using Pinyin it's the first thing you learn and it was a total epiphany. RIP.
- mtw 10y agoInterestingly, Chinese from mainland china don't know much about him. And I even doubt it will be in any headline in main press. In China, politics (esp. agreeing with the Communist party) is more important than achievements. I hope though that in a few decades, China will find a way to recognize him
- paradite 10y agoFrom the state media: http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu170114.shtml http://news.cctv.com/2017/01/14/ARTInHPZIsUdE9qsNSoyKQZu1701... http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.html http://tv.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0114/c61600-29023458.ht... From the two largest news website: http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html http://news.163.com/17/0114/22/CAPAC2CT00018AOQ.html http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t http://news.sohu.com/20170114/n478709845.shtml?fi?_t=t More coverage from baidu: http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E9%9F%B3 http://news.baidu.com/ns?cl=2&rn=20&tn=news&word=%E6%8B%BC%E...
- queryly 10y agoPingyin doesn't not only help me learn Chinese, but also learn English's pronunciation later in life. It's not one-to-one match but close enough. Bopomofo predates Pingyin and did what Pingyin did but with non-Latin alphabet. It was always a surprise looking back that Mao adopted "Western" alphabets for Pingyin when he was very much against western ideology. It was an excellent call, especially when writing is done digitally nowadays.
- philliphaydon 10y agoI'm currently learning Zhuyin.
- mmport80 10y agoActually - the legend goes - that Mao wanted to ditch Chinese characters in favour of Pinyin, until Stalin said every great civilisation needs its own writing system. Chinese writing was seen as a factor in holding back the country - everything was up for change or removal.
- enjalot 10y agoi made a visual explanation/exploration tool about pinyin: http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/ http://enjalot.github.io/pinyin/ Pinyin really helped me learn Chinese. RIP
- ww520 10y agoVery cool!
- crazygringo 10y agoAs someone who spent time learning Chinese in Beijing, this article is very confusing to me. I learned Chinese, like pretty much every other foreigner, via pinyin pronunciation -- and it's great for language courses. And it's also great for road signs that foreigners can actually read. But I never heard of pinyin being used by/for the Chinese themselves (except, now, as one computer typing system among many, although it still outputs in characters). All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin. And increases in literacy in China are simply due to widespread schooling and massive efforts at memorization of characters by children -- pinyin has absolutely zero value for functional literacy, because everything is still written in characters. (There are no pinyin newspapers or books I ever saw.) EDIT: I see from comments below that pinyin is used with schoolchildren in mainland China, thanks. But I still don't see how this has helped literacy, when all reading material is still in characters.
- theseadroid 10y agoAs someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for inputting Chinese into electronic devices. >All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin. No, we use latin letters in mainland China, Taiwan uses special characters. The article is very accurate. Older generations like my parents have to learn latin lettered pinyin by themselves to use PCs and smartphones. And the pinyin form of my name and home address are on my passport.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y agoCan you explain the reasoning behind typing in pinyin to see the output in traditional characters? To a native English speaker this sounds silly and pointless. Is it something that's mostly tradition or is there advantage to typing this way?
- jhedwards 10y ago
- noufalibrahim 10y agoThere was a short interview with him in Stephen Fry's "Planet word" series of documentaries. His humility was very inspiring.
- FabHK 10y agoPertinent resources: * Pinyin Info, http://www.pinyin.info/ http://www.pinyin.info/ * Language Log, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ , in particular Victor Mair's posts * "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", John DeFrancis * "Asia's Orthographic Dilemma", Wm. C. Hannas, extract available here http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/orthographic.html
- achou 10y agoTo understand the impact of Pinyin, all you have to do is take a look at the alternative input sources for Chinese on your computer or phone. On my Mac it's under Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources. Add a new input source for Select Chinese (Simplified) and take a look at the alternatives: - Stroke, which uses only symbol characters and numbers to "write" words. Good luck with that! - Trackpad handwriting. You "write" the characters on your trackpad and it recognizes them. Works pretty well if you already know how to write the characters. But it's much, much slower in my opinion. Plus, you need to memorize how to write thousands of characters and how the characters connect to how the words sound, which there is no systematic mapping for. - Wubi Xing, which I'm unfamiliar with but seems radical based. Just look at the keyboard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method - Pinyin, which uses your regular English keyboard. With a little training, you can sound out Chinese words and immediately type them with autocorrect-like functionality that works amazingly well. I can type Chinese almost as fast as English this way. In short, Pinyin has made it possible for Chinese people to operate efficiently in the modern world we live in.
- philliphaydon 10y agoI can type fine with Zhuyin keyboard... Shame you an only buy them in Hong Kong and Taiwan tho :(
- achou 10y agoSimple example using Pinyin: 你好吗 is "Hello, how are you?". In Pinyin you'd type: "ni hao ma?". It sounds like this: https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/你好吗？ https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/你好吗？
- Al-Khwarizmi 10y agoA funny thing about how the Chinese type on their phones is that not only they use Pinyin, but they use the old-school numeric input method (2="abc", 3="def", etc., like SMS in the pre-smartphone era) to type it. Or at least that's what I saw most people do when I went to Beijing, maybe in other regions/demographics it's different. I find it rather amusing that while in the West we use 30 keys to type our around 30 characters, in China they use 10 keys to type their thousands of characters. Also, it's probably not a bad idea for those of us with a tendency to fat-finger (like myself). I was quite faster writing messages on pre-smartphone keyboards than on smartphone ones (although probably a large part of that is physical key feedback vs. virtual keys). I'd definitely give a 10-key option a try on my smartphone, but it isn't offered.
- thewayfarer 10y agoI have long thought that Pinyin is underestimated for its simplicity, conciseness, and its implicit description of regional phonetics in China. Its uses all 26 letters of English except for "v", but "v" on a keyboard is used to type "ü" instead, and so Pinyin input does not need a special keyboard layout. A basic QWERTY layout is all that's needed. This is an improvement over the Wade-Giles system which requires diacritics and curious apostrophes that the international community--which generally had no interest in learning Chinese or the peculiarities of the Wades-Giles system--learned to ignore when writing Chinese words with the Wade-Giles system (i.e. Taipei should be T'aipei. In Pinyin it's Taibei. Tai chi chuan should be T'ai chi ch'uan. In Pinyin it is Taiji quan). When I was beginning to learn Mandarin while studying abroad in Chongqing, I was very frustrated with understanding the southern accent. Instead of pronouncing "zh", "ch", "sh" (retroflex consonants), the locals would pronounce "z", "c", "s" (dental/alveolar sibilant consonants). As you can see, Pinyin makes this pronunciation disparity easier to understand for learners and to anticipate the way that many southerners will (mis)pronounce Mandarin. Learning all of varieties of pronunciation in China is still a daunting task with or without Pinyin, but at least it describes this major one pretty well.
- justicezyx 10y agoPinyin actually also slightly changed how Chinese words are pronounced. There was once a exploratory idea of abandoning Chines written language as a whole, and adopt fully the latin-character-based language. The compromise is pinyin, a latin-based pronunciation system and simplified written language. This absolutely modernize the nation. It's no small feat to educate 1BB+ people in a few decades. The nation's unity is once again at an unprecedented level. This is not without its cost. Modern Chinese pronunciation is considered less appealing to ears, meaning that many sound disappears in the new system. The resultant language often sounds more dull compared to historical system. The written language is less artful. The traditional written language is no doubt a more appropriate subject for Chinese Calligraphy. I guess the global momentum to move to a more latin-based language is not going to be stopped. But it's nevertheless a saddening event to see a nation's historical root is altered significantly in a short period of time. This did not destroy the root, it's still there. But the changes are more artificial and more brutal.