汉语拼音之父：周有光

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汉语拼音之父：周有光

作者：

来源：《时代英语·高一》2014年第01期

周有光，如果不是研究汉语或是对汉语感兴趣的人，或许对这个名字很陌生。殊不知，这位今年108岁高寿的学者就是我们每天工作学习都离不开的汉语拼音的创始人之一。现在，就让我们一起走进周老先生的世界吧。

Even at 108 years old， Zhou Youguang is the kind of creative thinker that Chinese leaders regularly comma nd the government to cultivate in their bid to raise their nation from the world?s factory floor.

Mr Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin，the Romanized spelling system that linked China?s ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese translation of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1980s. He has written about 40 books， the most recent published in 2011.

Chinese characters do not directly correspond to sounds. Pi nyin?s phonetic alphabet enabled learners to match words easily to actual speech.

“It had an enormous impact on literacy，” said Victor H. Mair， a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. All Chinese students now begin to read and write using Pinyin before moving on to characters.

Sweet-natured but wry and rigidly dispassionate， Mr Zhou works at a tiny wooden desk in a government-provided， third-floor walk-up apartment with unpainted concrete walls. His longtime colleague Chen Zhangtai， 82， said Mr Zhou thought renovations would be too distracting.

He described Mr Zhou as the embodiment of a “true scholar.” He added，“His blog entries range from the modernization of Confucianism to Silk Road histo ry and China?s new middle class. Computer screens hurt his eyes， but he devours foreign newspapers and magazines. A well-known Chinese artist nicknamed him …Trendy Old Guy? ”.

Mr Zhou was born on Jan. 13， 1906， when the Qing Dynasty ruled and women bound their feet. The son of a Qing Dynasty official， he married the daughter of a wealthy family and went into banking.

After the Japanese invaded in 1937， his family was forced into the countryside to escape Japanese bombs in Chongqing，China?s wartime capital. His 5-year-old daughter died from appendicitis.