Zhou Youguang sits at home in Beijing, in 2015. Born when a Qing dynasty emperor was on the throne, he went on to help invent the Pinyin writing system used for transliterating the Chinese alphabet.

Zhou Youguang invented Pinyin, a system of romanizing Chinese characters using the Western alphabet. But instead of being treated as a hero, he's now a thorn in the government's side. The 105-year ...

Most people have probably never heard of 111-year-old linguist Zhou Youguang. But if you’re learning Chinese, you’ve seen his work. He helped develop the pinyin writing system – the ...

Pinyin is arguably the easiest way of learning the pronunciations of characters. However, while it is mandatory for many students in Hong Kong to learn Hanyu Pinyin in Putonghua classes, Cantonese ...

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 ...

Reporting from beijing — Zhou Youguang, a linguist considered the father of modern China’s Pinyin Romanization writing system, died Saturday at the age of 111. Born in 1906 during China’s ...

Taipei Times: What led your team to invent the Tongyong Pinyin system? Yu Bor-chuan: Inconsistencies in Mandarin Romanization have long been a contentious issue in Taiwan.Aware of the gravity of the ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin, died ...

Rather, they choose pinyin because it helps project Taiwan’s identity internationally and is, therefore, a potential soft-power tool. The legislators’ second claim that Tongyong pinyin is closer to ...

Zhou Youguang, who in 1958 invented Pinyin, the romanized spelling system that linked ancient Chinese writing to the modern age, died Saturday in Beijing. The system forever changed how the world ...

Dialect names have an enduring appeal for Chinese Singaporeans, despite the Speak Mandarin campaign. Read more at ...