Any foreigner who has studied Chinese is aware that to learn Chinese well, they must first grasp Pinyin (an alphabetic system). Then they will be able to have a good command of Chinese pronunciation, and better equipped to obtain a basic knowledge of Chinese culture. However, the written form of Chinese, just like ancient Hebrew, is hieroglyphic, and there is no indication of the pronunciation in the written form. So what is the origin of the Pinyin used by Chinese people and the international community?
When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, there were dozens of dialects spoken by 56 ethnic groups throughout the country, rendering difficulties in inter-communication between people groups; and what’s worse, over 80% of the population was illiterate, a result of wars and long-term lack of unified phonetic symbols. In order to change this situation, it was paramount that a unified scheme of Chinese Pinyin be formulated. To this end, the Chinese government put the reform of the writing system high on its national work agenda. Many experts and scholars were selected from all over the country to engage in this pioneering undertaking. Zhou Youguang, a famous Chinese Linguist and philologist, was one of those people.
Committed to a New Profession
Born in Changzhou, Jiangsu in 1906, Zhou was admitted to St. John's University in Shanghai in 1923. Majoring in economics though, he possessed a strong interest in linguistics. He often attended linguistics courses and read a lot of books on alphabetography and linguistics in his spare time.
After graduating from the university, Zhou engaged in financial related work, but always kept alive his passion for words and linguistics. He frequently published articles concerning reform of the writing system in magazines.
In 1946, he was assigned to work in New York by Xinhua Bank. Then when China ushered in a new era in 1949, he resolutely gave up a better life abroad and returned to China taking the post of economics professor at Fudan University.
In 1955, Zhou Youguang was invited to attend a national conference on the reform of Chinese characters convened by the central government in Beijing. By then he was already a specialist of the Chinese, English, French, and Japanese languages, and had conducted extensive research on the reform of the writing system.
As Zhou Youguang was preparing to return to Shanghai after the conference, Wu Yuzhang, director of the Chinese Characters Reform Committee urged him to stay, hoping he would join the team. At first, Zhou hesitated, saying, "I am an amateur in linguistics and philology, it would be inappropriate for me to stay." To the remark Wu Yuzhang responded, "This is a new initiative, and we are all amateurs.” Later, Chen Wangdao, president of Fudan University, also urged Zhou to switch over to working on Chinese characters. Even the then Premier Zhou Enlai called him personally inviting him to join in the work.
After careful consideration, Zhou finally accepted the invitation and moved to Beijing with his family. The Chinese Characters Reform Committee, which took charge of reforming the national writing system, had two research setups under it: the Pinyin Research Office and the Chinese Characters Simplification Research Office, respectively responsible for the formulation of Chinese Pinyin and the simplification of traditional Chinese characters. Zhou’s work mainly focused on the formulation of Pinyin. The Pinyin Research Office comprised of 15 linguists from several universities. Most of them mainly participated in conference discussions and voiced their opinions on the proposed scheme. "The specific work of Pinyin formulation was conducted by three people: Ye Laishi, Lu Zhiwei, and me. Ye Laishi served as the committee’s Secretary-General, and therefore was very busy with a tight schedule; Lu Zhiwei concurrently had to do his job as a teacher and a researcher with a linguistics institute. As for me, I left Shanghai and therefore devoted myself to this initiative," Zhou recalled.
While approaching the age of 50, he shifted from the economics to committing himself to linguistics.
Achievements after Three Years of Effort
At the beginning Zhou Youguang encountered a slew of problems: Whether the alphabet letters should be original or adopt existing ones? Which letters should be chosen if adopting the existing ones? Should the pronunciation of letters be changed? What devise should be chosen to formulate spelling rules to cover all commonly used Chinese characters? And being a tonal language, how could the tones of Chinese be expressed using written letters?
Virtually, as early as 1918, the Beiyang Government in Beijing (1912-1928) rolled out a scheme of phonetic alphabets involving 39 letters. Most of the letters were modified from ancient Chinese prose or hieroglyphic writing fragments, with five tones. But it failed to achieve recognition by the international community. In 1928, the Nationalist Government in Nanjing also released a system of Roman alphabet Pinyin, using 26 existing Latin letters based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect while also giving consideration to the international spelling habits. Yet, the complexity of the tones resulted in difficult implementation.
After studying the writing systems of all languages around the world, Zhou Youguang still regarded the Latin alphabet as most suitable. First, it boasted numerous technical pluses; and second, it had the strongest circulation and the most extensive influence. Finally, he opted to use 21 of the 26 Latin letters and added five letters from other languages. There are four tones in Chinese language. The second, third, and fourth tones use the original alphabetic notation, while for the first tone, Zhou borrowed the minus sign in mathematics, and with that the problem of phonetic notations was solved immediately.
During this phase, Soviet linguists tried to persuade China not to adopt the Latin alphabet, and use the Russian and Slavic alphabet instead. But these proposals were rejected by the then Vice Premier Chen Yi on the grounds that China wanted to build relationship with Southeast Asia. As few people in Southeast Asia recognized the Russian alphabet, the adoption of the Latin alphabet would help to promote and disseminate the Chinese language.
"Vice Premier Chen Yi did a great job. If the Russian alphabet were adopted at that time, there would have been more troubles today, and the mechanism would have to be scrapped and re-initiated,” Zhou recalled later .
It took Zhou Youguang three years to supervise the compilation of the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, using 26 letters as the basis of phonetic notation, which today is generally applied in China. In February 1958, the National People's Congress adopted the resolution on the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet. In the same year, Chinese Pinyin became a compulsory course in primary schools throughout the country.
The nationwide campaign against illiteracy was able to achieve new advances as a result of promoting Chinese Pinyin. Experts deemed that the introduction of the Pinyin scheme not only gave the 5,000-year-old Chinese language a standardized pronunciation, but also enabled school-age children to start reading masterpieces two years earlier. In Wanxian County in southern Shanxi, for example, the peasants were able to master Chinese Pinyin in 15-20 hours on average, and learned to read 1,500 words in 100 hours.
Over the past six decades, Chinese Pinyin has significantly contributed to popularizing education and to the development of scientific and cultural undertakings, demonstrating a vitality throughout the process of promoting information technology and opening up to the outside world.
Becoming an International Standard
Starting in the 1960s, Zhou Youguang and his colleagues traveled to many countries to participate in international conferences, striving to achieve international recognition of the Pinyin scheme.
"It is significant for Chinese Pinyin to become an international standard. For example, in the field of aviation, the lack of a unified phonetic writing style for Chinese flight information would easily trigger problems. What if the planes collide in the sky?" Zhou said.
At the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) conference on documentation technology in Warsaw in 1974, Zhou Youguang delivered a speech on behalf of the People's Republic of China, proposing the adoption of the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet as an international standard for the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters. In 1982, the ISO voted to accept the scheme as the international standard for the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters. "It is generally considered that the time taken to devise the Chinese Pinyin scheme were only three years, but this is not accurate. In reality, it took 14 years from formulating the scheme to the international recognition of it. Looking still further ahead, it is the achievement of 100 years of effort by the Chinese nation," he said.
The adoption of the Pinyin scheme as an international standard blazed a new trail for the Chinese culture to flow to the world. In 1998 which marked the 40th anniversary of the issue of the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, the U.S. Library of Congress decided to change its catalogue of all 70 Chinese books from the old-style spelling to the Chinese Pinyin.
The Chinese Pinyin has erected a bridge for connecting the pronunciation with the writing of the Chinese language. It helps markedly reduce the illiteracy rate and alleviate the pain of foreigners in learning Chinese[1] . Zhou Youguang hence won the fame as the "father of Chinese Pinyin", an honor which he had refrained from receiving. He noted, "It took one hundred years to formulate Chinese Pinyin. I was only one of the few people who participated in the ultimate devise of the scheme. Thus, I am not qualified to be named the ‘father of Chinese Pinyin’."
Zhou's passion for Linguistics lasted all throughout his lifetime. He wrote and compiled more than 40 books and participated in a multitude of major national cultural construction initiatives. He passed away in 2017 at the age of 112, and will always be remembered for his significant role in promoting the implementation of China's national language planning, as well as the standardization of Chinese spoken and written language.
