Foxy
- 2017-01-16
It's amazing when you stop for a moment to think about how much 'bad press' China gets, not least on this board, about all the bad air quality, pollution, unsafe food and drinking water, etc, then this 'old duck' lives to be a ripe old 111.
Watching something on TV the other day (I forget what), but someone said 'This world is upside down'. Food for thought, eh....
Late in life, he became an outspoken critic of the Chinese government.Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.
In recent decades, with the comparative invincibility that he felt great age bestowed on him, Mr. Zhou was also an outspoken critic of the Chinese government.
Adopted by China in 1958, Pinyin was designed not to replace the tens of thousands of traditional characters with which Chinese is written, but as an orthographic pry bar to afford passage into the labyrinthine world of those characters.
Since then, Pinyin (the name can be translated as “spelled sounds”) has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.