A portrait taken in Beijing in 1974 of Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai. In 1955, Zhou Enlai invited Zhou Youguang to simplify Chinese characters and devise a new alphabet, so that Mandarin could be ...

Hong Kong-born pop singer Coco Lee is so fashionable she is inspiring mainland fans to adopt her last name. Technically they already have her name. Millions of people are surnamed Lee, but in the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...