80S - Key Persons
Charles Yang* is perhaps best known for the development of the Tolerance Principle, a way to quantify and predict (given some input) whether a rule will become productive. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he collaborates with various researchers around the world to test and extend the Tolerance Principle and gain greater insight into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.
Professor Emeritus Petr Sgall, professor of Indo-European, Czech studies, and general linguistics at Charles University in Prague, passed away on May 28, 2019 in Prague, the day after his 93 rd birthday.
Zhou Youguang, the main architect and early advocate of Hanyu Pinyin (the official romanized orthography for Modern Standard Mandarin), had his 108th birthday yesterday. Although I've been a close friend and admirer of Professor Zhou since 1981, I've never dedicated a Language Log post exclusively to him, so it's about time that I do so.