Father of Pinyin, Zhou Youguang, passes away at 111

[iguanamon]

I read this article this morning in the New York Times Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, Dies at 111. I don't study Mandarin but I enjoyed reading about the background of the development of Pinyin. I didn't know that Cyrillic was under consideration as a base for the alphabet but, obviously Roman characters won out. The article points out that Pinyin was a huge boost to literacy in China. The man responsible for its development was an economist and an amateur linguist. An excerpt:

“...Within China, he remains largely uncelebrated,” The New York Times wrote in 2012. “As the state-run China Daily newspaper remarked in 2009, he should be a household name but is virtually unknown.”
It took Mr. Zhou and his colleagues three years to develop Pinyin, but the most striking thing about his involvement was that he was neither a linguist nor a lexicographer but an economist, recently returned to China from Wall Street.
But because of a fortuitous meeting at midcentury, and a lifetime love of language, he was conscripted by the Chinese government to develop an accessible alphabetic writing system. It was a turn of fate, Mr. Zhou acknowledged afterward, that may well have saved his life. ...

[Kamlari]

BBC (another beauty) Same topic.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38621697

[Zegpoddle]

The man responsible for its development was an economist and an amateur linguist.

Ah, THAT explains the seven infamous syllables (ci, xi, etc.) in which the i suddenly no longer sounds like the ee in the English word see but like the e in the French word de (if you were choking and swallowing while trying to say it)...and why the syllable liu actually sounds like "lyo"...and all those other little inconsistencies that drive systematic, organized learners like me totally crazy.

I once dropped a beginning Chinese class because I wasn't able to complete the first homework assignment in the time given: Learn the entire Pinyin system in exactly two days. First exposure on Tuesday...total mastery by Thursday. It wasn't as easy as the (bad) teacher led us to expect. There were too many irregularities and little nitpicky exceptions where the system misled me into believing certain Roman-alphabet letters corresponded to certain phonemes, but then the correspondences were broken in surprising, unexpected ways. I wonder if a professional linguist could have devised a system with fewer exceptions.

I don't mean to deny Zhou Youguang his well-deserved accolades. I've read that Pinyin is a huge improvement over earlier transliteration systems like Wade-Giles, and it sure beats having to learn Chinese with no phonetic transliterations at all (which, I guess, is how all foreigners had to learn it until the late 19th century--ouch!). And as the article makes clear, Pinyin almost certainly saved its creator's life during the Cultural Revolution.

I'm not finished with Chinese. I will take another crack at it, this time at my own pace. I will start with Pinyin and absorb all of its curious wrinkles and eccentricities, giving myself more than two days to get the job done. And every time I trip over a syllable whose transliteration is misleading, I'll curse and praise the Father of Pinyin in the same breath.

[yong321]

Ah, THAT explains the seven infamous syllables (ci, xi, etc.) in which the i suddenly no longer sounds like the ee in the English word see but like the e in the French word de (if you were choking and swallowing while trying to say it)...and why the syllable liu actually sounds like "lyo"...and all those other little inconsistencies that drive systematic, organized learners like me totally crazy.

In pinyin, i in ci and xi is really hard to represent. If e were used, then many sounds that currently use e (de e.g.) would be changed to something else, and that starts a chain reaction. I think i is still close enough, especially in xi. Don't you think? I agree that liu is bad, but lyo is not ideal either because o may be pronounced either /o/ or /əʊ/ by learners.