汉语拼音之父：周有光

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.

In 1946， Mr Zhou and his family moved to New York， where he represented the Xinhua Trust and Savings Bank. He toured the United States in luxury Pullman cars， rode the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner to Europe and fended off offers from Western banks. His intellectual life was equally rich： he had several lengthy chats with Albert Einstein.

In 1949， Mr Zhou brought his family home. He taught economics at a university in Shanghai and studied linguistics as a hobby.

In 1955， Zhou Enlai， prime minister， called him to Beijing. The party wanted to make Mandarin China‟s national language， simplify Chinese characters and devise a new phonetic alphabet.

Mr Zhou‟s son， Zhou Xiaoping， an astrophysicist， said his father protested that he was a mere amateur. He was told：“Everyone is an amateur.”

In his new job， Mr Zhou found tremendous confusion， but also a foundation for his work. In the late 1500s， the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci had formulated a system to Romanize Chinese characters. Many English speakers were already using the British Wade-Giles system developed in the 19th century. Chinese linguists had devised other alternatives.

Mr Zhou argued for the Roman alphabet， to better connect China with the outside world. In 1958， after three years of work， Pinyin—literally “to piece together sounds”—was finished and quickly adopted.

Mr Zhou says Chinese characters will exist for centuries to come. But to his delight， Pinyin has proven ever more useful. Chinese now rely on Pinyin-to-character programs to input chinese characters， text messages， post on Internet microblogs and write e-mails.

尽管已经108岁高龄，周有光老先生仍然是一位极富创见的思想家。我国领导人时不时地都会要求政府工作人员去聆听他的意见，以提高中国在世界工厂中的地位。

周老先生发明了拼音，用拉丁字母来拼写古老的中国汉字，让我国文字现代化，这几乎帮助我国消灭了文盲。20世纪80年代，他曾主持翻译中文版的《不列颠百科全书》。他有40余本著作，最近一本是2011年出版的。

汉字本身并不直接表示发音。拼音的音标字母使学习者能够轻而易举地将文字与发音匹配在一起。

“它对读写识字产生了重要的影响。”宾夕法尼亚大学中国语言与文学教授Victor H. Mair

这样说，“现在所有的中国学生在学习汉字以前都先学习使用拼音读写。”