Sound Principles

The phonetic alphabet developed by Zhou Youguang, pinyin, turns 50 this month, having helped up to a billion Chinese citizens to learn to read, write and in many cases speak the national language.

The 102-year-old linguist is renowned as the "father of pinyin", the system for representing standard Mandarin in the Roman alphabet. The country is celebrating the anniversary with lectures, a TV series and educational programmes.

Although Youguang is marking the half-century by publishing the latest of his many books, he is otherwise modest about his achievements and a life so packed with incident that for many years he completely forgot a brief friendship with Albert Einstein.

"I'm not the father of pinyin - I'm the son of pinyin," says Youguang.
"It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect."

The results are remarkable. Over the last half-century, the illiteracy rate in China has slumped from 80% to as little as 10% - the precise figure is disputed - thanks to a combination of mass education, simplified characters and pinyin.

"[Pinyin] is very simple but had a significant purpose. First, it denotes the sound of Chinese characters," Youguang explains.

"Second, it has helped [students] to learn putonghua, the national standard language. Before, I met a Cantonese and a Hokkien in foreign countries and couldn't communicate - I had to speak English to them. Without an alphabet you had to learn mouth to mouth, ear to ear. It's a bridge to speech between Chinese people."

Chan Yuen Chi, associate professor at the School of Chinese, Hong Kong University, argues that pinyin succeeded because it was a better phonetic match than other transcription methods, and was "extremely easy and convenient" because it used a widely recognised alphabet rather than other symbols.

"On a level of practicality, it makes up for the fact that Chinese characters do not indicate the sounds themselves," he says.

"In politics, economics and every kind of cultural work, it has very important value. China is a country of many dialects, and hanyu pinyin helps the realising of a common language for the entire nation."

Youguang's involvement came about by chance. He was a banker working in New York when the communists seized power in 1949 and, like many expatriates, he returned home to help rebuild his country.

"We all thought that China had a very good opportunity to develop; we didn't expect the later turmoil. History misled us," he says.

It soon became clear that his economic expertise was not required or appreciated. But in 1955 the government asked him to put his hobby - languages - to use by overseeing reforms. It believed only an explosion in literacy could allow China to develop.

Two years later, the unwanted career change saved him when Mao Zedong launched his anti-rightist campaign against intellectuals.

"Mao disliked greatly the economists - especially economic professors from America. By that time I had shifted to the line of language and writing. I was not considered a rightist. Very lucky," Youguang recalls.

"If I had remained in Shanghai teaching economics I think I certainly could have been imprisoned for 20 years. A good friend of mine was imprisoned and committed suicide; my student committed suicide."

However, he was denounced as a reactionary academic during the Cultural Revolution in the late Sixties, and exiled to the countryside.

Youguang, who still produces a paper a month from his modest flat in Beijing, is cheered to see that pinyin is growing ever more useful.

Many people rely on pinyin-to-character conversion programmes to send text messages or type on their computers and even Chinese Braille is based on the system.

But many students forget pinyin once they have reached their ultimate goal.

"Pinyin is not to replace Chinese characters; it is a help to Chinese characters," Youguang says.

"They have a very long tradition of more than 3,000 years ... people will use them for at least 500 years more. It's almost impossible to change to another writing system because it's so deeply rooted in China."

Nor does he believe that Mandarin will overtake English as the major international language, despite China's growing power and his own surprise at the number of foreigners learning putonghua.

"Chinese characters or pinyin will never be a competitor to English. [Its dominance] is the work of over 400 years," he added.

Background

Chinese languages do not have an alphabet. Instead they have a character for each word, which does not indicate pronunciation (although it sometimes contains a phonetic element).

The resulting difficulty in learning to read and write - or learning putonghua, standard Mandarin, if not a native speaker - has led to numerous attempts to develop phonetic representation systems.

The first attempts to transcribe Mandarin in the Roman alphabet were designed by foreigners seeking to learn Chinese; the best-known - though not the first - is Wade-Giles, produced and refined by two British diplomats in the second half of the 19th century.

The Chinese subsequently produced their own phonetic alphabet, Zhuyin, also known as Bopomofo after its first letters. Then came Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a romanisation system that spelled the tones as well as the sounds of words - but proved so complicated that few could master it.

The communists turned to Zhou Youguang and his team to develop a replacement that could establish standard Mandarin as a truly national language and increase literacy.

Chinese children who grow up speaking putonghua use pinyin to associate characters with spoken words. Those who grow up with other languages also use it as a guide to putonghua pronunciation.

Confusingly, Taiwan uses several different romanisation methods - including a variant of pinyin, tongyong pinyin - and zuiyin. Attempts to enforce a single system have proved highly controversial.

汉语拼音的身前身后

塔尼尔·布兰妮甘　北京报道 2008年2月21日星期四

视频链接

拼音，这套由周有光主创的语音字母系统，本月迎来了它的50岁生日。至今，它已经帮助多达十亿中国人学会读写和用普通话交流。

这位一百零二岁高龄的语言学家被誉为"拼音之父"。拼音是用罗马字母来标注标准普通话读音的系统。中国正在用拼音课程、一部电视系列片和其他教学活动来庆祝拼音的50周年。

尽管半个世纪以来周有光一直在著书立说，但面对自己的成就和多彩的一生，他却十分谦虚。他甚至完全忘记了自己多年前与爱因斯坦的一段友谊。

"我不是拼音之父，我是拼音之子。"周有光这样说到。

"拼音源自清朝末年至今的长期实践，而我们只不过是对过去的问题重新研究和进行修改，使之更完美。"

这套方案产生的影响是巨大的。尽管具体数字仍有争议，但过去半个世纪中，在大众教育、简体字以及拼音的综合作用下，中国的文盲率已从80%大副削减到仅10%。

"拼音虽说极其简单，却意义深远。首先，它标记了汉字的发音。"　周有光解释说。

"其次，它帮助学生掌握中国的标准语言－－普通话。从前，我在国外碰到一个广东人和一个福建人，却没法和他们交谈。最后，我只好跟他们说英语。没有注音字母的时候，人们只能靠口口相传学习语言，而如今拼音在说不同方言的中国人之间架起了一座桥梁。"

香港大学中文系副教授陈志远认为，拼音的成功归因于两点：首先，与其他注音方案相比，它和汉字更加匹配；其次，采用广为熟知的罗马字母而非其他符号，使得掌握拼音相当容易和方便。

"在实用层面上，它弥补了汉字本身并不表音的缺陷。"　他这样说。

"在政治、经济和文化的各个领域，它都有非常重大的价值。中国是一个多方言的国家，而汉语拼音使得一种统一的语言得以在全国通行。"

周有光参与汉语拼音方案的创制纯属偶然。1949年共产党夺取政权时，他是个在纽约工作的银行家。但和许多流亡者（注：此处按原文翻译，有读者指出，周有光先生并不是流亡者，而只是被外派到纽约新华银行工作）一样，他毅然返回祖国，参与国家的重建。

"我们当时都认为中国有很好的发展机遇，却没有料到后来会发生动乱。历史误导了我们。"他这样说到。

回国后不久，他就发现他的经济学专长并没有用武之地。但1955年，政府因为周有光对语言的爱好，指派他来领导语言文字改革。中国政府认为，必须快速扫盲，才能促进中国的发展。

两年之后，毛泽东发起了针对知识分子的反右运动。而这个当初并非周有光所期望的职业转型，反而救了他的命。

"毛泽东非常不喜欢经济学家，尤其是那些从美国回来的经济学教授。但那时我已经转向了语言文字工作，所以没有被当成右派。真是非常幸运。"周有光回忆说。

"如果我还继续留在上海教经济学，后来肯定会被关个20年。我的一个好朋友被关了起来，后来自杀了。我的学生也自杀了。"

不过，在六十年代末的文化大革命中，他仍然被指控为反革命学究，遣送下乡。

住在北京一套普通公寓里的周有光，如今仍每月写一篇论文，他很高兴看到拼音正变得越来越有用。

许多中国人用拼音输入法发送手机短信，在电脑上打字，甚至于连中文的盲人点字法也基于这套方案。

不过许多学生在学成之后就把拼音忘了。

"拼音的出现不是为了取代汉字，相反，它是汉字的帮手。"周有光说。

"汉字有超过三千年的悠久历史......而至少在五百年内，人们还将继续使用它们。由于汉字已深深扎根于中国文化，要想用另一套书写系统来取代它几乎是不可能的。"

随着中国逐渐强大，他也诧异于有如此多的外国人开始学习普通话。但他却不认为中文会取代英语，成为主要国际语言。

"汉字或拼音永远也不可能成为英语的竞争者，毕竟英语已经统治了四百多年。"他补充到。


背景材料


中文没有字母系统，而是每一个"单词"都有一个对应的汉字，但是这些汉字并不表音（尽管有些汉字有声旁）。

这样的语言系统使得掌握读写，以及让母语非中文的人学习普通话变得非常困难。于是人们创制了几个不同的注音系统。

第一套用罗马字母对普通话注音的系统，是由想学中文的外国人设计的。其中最著名，但不是最早的一种，叫做韦氏拼音。它由两个英国外交官于19世纪下半叶创制并完善。

不久中国人创制了自己的语音字母系统－－注音，因为这套系统的前几个字母，它又被叫做"波泼摸佛（ㄅㄆㄇㄈ　Bopomofo）"。再后来出现的是国语罗马字，一套用来标记声调和字音的罗马拼音法。不过由于过于复杂，很少有人能掌握。

最后，共产党把任务交给了周有光和他的伙伴。希望他们能创制一套系统以奠定普通话做为中国通用语言的地位，并为民众扫盲。

从小讲普通话长大的中国孩子通过拼音将口语和文字联系起来，而从小讲其他方言长大的孩子则用它来学习普通话发音。

令人费解的是，台湾使用了好几种不同的罗马拼音法，包括拼音的一种变体、通用拼音以及注音。他们曾试图用一套系统来进行统一，却因引起很大争议而不了了之。