The Father Of Hanyu Pinyin . . .

. . . now we know who to blame!

Pretty much every time I run into a certain Taiwan-based journalist friend of mine we argue as to which pinyin is the best, but it has to be said that even coming up with a fairly meaningful system is acheivement enough - see the Wade-Giles system if you want something which makes no sense whatsoever. Of course, what the above video doesn't show is that pinyin was developed mainly from the system used in the Soviet Union to transcribe Cyrillic script into the Roman alphabet, most of the work had already been done for Zhao You Guang, all he did was apply a similar system to Chinese.