Woo Tsin-hang

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Woo.

Woo Tsin-hang¹ (Chinese: 吳敬恆; pinyin: Wú Jìnghéng; Wade-Giles: Wu Ching-heng) (March 25, 1865 - October 30, 1953), born Wu Tiao (吳朓 Wú Tiǎo), with the courtesy name Chih-hui (稚暉 Zhìhuī), was a Chinese linguist and philosopher who was the chairman of the 1912–13 Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation that created Zhuyin (based on Zhang Binglin's work) and standardized Guoyu pronunciation.

Woo Tsin-hang was born in Wujin (武進), Jiangsu province, during the Qing Dynasty.

In 1905, before the establishment of the Republic of China, he met Sun Yat-sen in Europe and joined the Tong Meng Hui. He also became the first Academic Scholar of the Humanity Division (人文組院士) of the Academia Sinica and a representative in the National People's Delegate Conferences (國民大會). He moved to Taiwan and was the teacher of Chiang Ching-kuo. He died in Taipei at the age of 88.

He was also respected for his various styles of calligraphy, which is evident in the design of chu-yin; all of its symbols have the strokes and essence of calligraphy.

His publications can be found in The Collection of the Works of Mr. Wu Chih-hui (《吳稚暉先生集》).

[1] "Woo Tsin-hang," used in the Academia Sinica's Western publications, is his name pronounced in the Jiangsu dialect of Wu.