Mandarin characters don’t tell you how to pronounce a word. They are more like pictures that represent an object or an idea. Burt: Correct! Mandarin characters don't give us the sound of a word, so ...

Zhou Youguang should be a Chinese hero after making what some call the world's most important linguistic innovation: He invented Pinyin, a system of romanizing Chinese characters using the Western ...

FEW people live to 111. Fewer still leave as big a mark on linguistic lives as Zhou Youguang, who died on January 14th. Mr Zhou was the chief architect of pinyin, the system that the Chinese use to ...

Today’s Google doodle pays homage to the Chinese linguist Zhou Youguang on what would have been his 112th birthday. Youguang helped create the Chinese phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. He spent three ...

The inventor of Pinyin, a system that converted Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died on Saturday. Zhou Youguang was 111 years old. The inventor of Pinyin - that's the system of ...