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Without Zhou Youguang, the world would still refer to ‘Beijing’ as ‘Peking,’ and to ‘Chongqing’ as ‘Chungking.’
The celebrated linguist - dubbed 'the Father of Pinyin' - spent three years developing the system of ‘spelled sounds’ that is now the international standard for Romanised Chinese.
The new system transformed China’s literacy rate, providing more natural passage into the written language, which requires mastering thousands of characters.
It bridged multiple Chinese dialects with its shared designations of sound.
(Image: GOOGLE)
Today, schoolchildren learn Pinyin before characters, and it is often used to input characters on smartphones and computers.
Pursuing his love of language throughout his life, Youguang authored more than 40 books and translated the Encyclopedia Britannica into Chinese.
(Image: Wikipedia)
Born Zhou Yaoping on January 13, 1906, this storied linguist later adopted the pen name ‘Yougang’ because he wanted to ‘bring light’ to the world.
Google celebrates what would’ve been Yougang’s 112th birthday with a special Doodle which flips from Pinyin (Gǔgē) to Chinese characters (谷歌).
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Zhou Youguang: The "Simplified" Reason the Chinese Linguist Gets Google Doodle He's the reason that Chinese is, relatively speaking, so much easier to learn.
Have you ever wondered why it’s Peking Duck from the city of Beijing? Turns out, it’s all due to the work of a Chinese linguist named Zhou Youguang, who is being celebrated on Google’s homepage on Saturday.
Google’s doodle today shows the Pinyin characters (Gǔgē) flipping to Chinese characters (谷歌) to honor the 112th birthday of the man that created the system of “spelled sounds” that has become the standard for Romanized Chinese. Gǔgē / 谷歌 is how the popular search engine is translated into Mandarin Chinese.
Zhou started his project in 1955 at the behest of the Chinese government, completing it three years later in 1958. drastically increasing China’s literacy rate — which hovered around 15 percent for much of the early 20th century — and helped serve as a bridge between numerous Chinese dialects by providing a common”spelling” of sound.
Today, it is taught to Chinese schoolchildren as a predecessor to learning the complex hundreds of thousands of characters of the Chinese language. It was also Pinyin that, half a century later, allowed the Chinese language to be digitized.
Born as Zhou Youping in 1908, Zhou later changed his pen name to Youguang (meaning, roughly, to come into the light again), to bring light into the world. Before he became a linguist by virtue of creating the modern Chinese written language, he was a trained economist and had worked in the finance worlds in both New York City and London before returning to China and starting the project that would become his greatest legacy.
In addition to Pinyin, Zhou wrote more than forty books throughout his life and translated the Encyclopedia Brittanica into Mandarin Chinese. In his later life, he became an outspoken critic of communism — which is perhaps why in China, his name is virtually unknown.
Zhou died on January 14, 2017, a day after his 111th birthday.
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TRIBUNNEWS.COM - Digambarkan sebagai "ayah dari Pinyin", atau bahasa fonetik China, dan dipuji sebagai orang yang menyederhanakan bahasa China, Zhou Youguang berulang tahun yang ke 112 Sabtu (13/1/2018).
Zhaou Youguang dikenal dengan salah satu kata-katanya seperti berikut.
"Orang cina menjadi kaya tidak penting, kemajuan manusia pada akhirnya adalah kemajuan menuju demokrasi."
Dilansir Aljazeera , untuk menghormatinya, Google mengubah logonya di 12 negara dan menjadikannya Google doodle.
Zhou Youguang diketahui lahir pada tahun 1906 di Changzhou.
Ia sudah menunjukkan minat pada linguistik atau ilmu bahasa sejak usia 12 tahun.
Dinamakan Zhou Yaoping, dia mengadopsi nama sebuah pena "Yougang" karena ia ingin membawa "terang" ke dunia.
