the most recent published last year.周有光是拼音的发明者。拼音是一种字母化拼写系统，它让中国的古老文字与现代接轨，帮助中国扫除了大批文盲。周有光也是80年代中国翻译《大英百科全书》的带头人之一。他一生著有40多部著作！In 1955, Zhou Enlai, now prime minister, called him to Beijing. The ...
这是老外的评论—1958年 周有光发明
Mr. Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system that linked China’s ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1980s. He has written about 40 books, the most recent published last year.
周有光是拼音的发明者。拼音是一种字母化拼写系统，它让中国的古老文字与现代接轨，帮助中国扫除了大批文盲。周有光也是80年代中国翻译《大英百科全书》的带头人之一。他一生著有40多部著作！
In 1955, Zhou Enlai, now prime minister, called him to Beijing. The party wanted to make Mandarin China’s national language, simplify Chinese characters and devise a new phonetic alphabet. Mr. Zhou’s son, Zhou Xiaoping, an astrophysicist, said his father protested that he was a mere amateur. He was told: “Everyone is an amateur.”
1955年，当时的总理周恩来召周有光进京。共产党想让普通话成为中国的通用语言，希望简化汉字并制订自己的音标系统。周有光的儿子，天体物理学家周小平说，当时他的父亲推辞说自己只是外行，可是得到的回答是：“人人都是外行。”
In his new job, Mr. Zhou found tremendous confusion, but also a foundation for his work. In the late 1500s, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci had formulated a system to Romanize Chinese characters. Many English speakers were already using the British Wade-Giles system, developed in the 19th century. Chinese linguists had devised other alternatives.
接手新工作，周有光遇到了巨大的困难，但同时他也打下了事业的基础。16世纪末，来自意大利的利玛窦发明了给汉字字母化的系统。而当时很多英语使用者已经开始使用19世纪发明的英国韦氏拼音系统。中国的语言工作者也发明过自己的体系。
Mr. Zhou’s team wrangled endlessly: how to cope with the homonyms that are rife in Chinese; how to indicate the four tones of Mandarin; whether to use a Cyrillic, Japanese or Roman alphabet, or to invent a new Chinese alphabet based on the shapes of characters.
周有光的小组陷入不停的争论：怎样处理中文中大量的同音异形词？怎样标示普通话的四声？是使用斯拉夫字母，日语字母，还是罗马字母？抑或是发明一个以中文字形为基础了中文字母系统？
Mr. Zhou argued for the Roman alphabet, to better connect China with the outside world. In 1958, after three years of work, Pinyin — literally “to piece together sounds” — was finished and quickly adopted.
周有光力挺罗马字母，因为罗马字母更方面中国与外接交流。1958年，三年的工作成果终于问世——“拼音”——“拼起来的音”，终于制订完成并迅速被国家采用。
原文请您看看我告诉你网址：
http://article.yeeyan.org/view/287574/2563692014-04-14
