Google Honors Chinese Linguist Zhou Youguang with Doodle

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Google, The search engine site, which sometimes uses its homepage to honor prominent figures, just recently highlighted Zhou Youguang, a famous Chinese linguist, to celebrate him on what would have been his 112th birthday.

Born Zhou Yaoping in China on Jan. 13, 1906, he was raised by a Qing Dynasty official. By the time he was a teenager, he developed an interest in linguistics and earned his high school diploma with honors.

After graduation, he attended St. John's University in Shanghai, where he studied economics and linguistics. He later transferred to Guanghua University, where he graduated in 1927.

Throughout his career, he taught economics as a college professor. Then in 1955, the Chinese government placed him at the head of a committee to reform the Chinese language to improve literacy.

For three years, he and members of the committee developed Pinyin, the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, transforming the Chinese language.

“The new system transformed China’s literacy rate, providing more natural passage into the written language, which requires mastering thousands of characters,” Google wrote on its blog. “It bridged multiple Chinese dialects with its shared designations of sound.”

Known as the “Father of Pinyin,” he went on to write 40 books, and he translated the Encyclopedia Britannica into Chinese.

In 2017, he died at his home in Beijing at age, a day after his 111th birthday. Now Google is paying tribute.

AJC.COM