Zhou Youguang sits at home in Beijing, in 2015. Born when a Qing dynasty emperor was on the throne, he went on to help invent the Pinyin writing system used for transliterating the Chinese alphabet.

Inventor Who Made Chinese Easier To Read, Dies 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.

Zhou Youguang, the inventor of a system to convert Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died Saturday at the age of 111. Since his system was introduced nearly six decades ago, few ...

Chinese scientists told the Post that publishing under just their pinyin name - in English-language journals in which Mandarin is represented in the Latin alphabet - was challenging when it came ...

Most people have probably never heard of 111-year-old linguist Zhou Youguang. But if you’re learning Chinese, you’ve seen his work. He helped develop the pinyin writing system – the ...

Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin).

Millions of people are surnamed Lee, but in the mainland's official Pinyin alphabet - a Roman-letter system used since 1958 to transliterate Chinese characters into phonetics - it comes out as 'Li'.