Everything about Yuen Ren Chao totally explained
Yuen Ren Chao (
November 3,
1892 -
February 25,
1982) was a
Chinese American linguist and
amateur composer. He made important contributions to the modern study of
Chinese phonology and
grammar.
Besides helping to shape the
Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a Chinese romanization scheme, Chao is also credited with inventing a notation for transcribing
tonal pitch variation in spoken languages.
Life
Born in
Tianjin with ancestry in
Changzhou,
Jiangsu Province, Chao went to the United States with a
Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship in 1910 to study
mathematics at
Cornell University, switching to
philosophy later. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from
Harvard University.
Already in college, his interests had turned to music and languages. He spoke
German and
French fluently and some
Japanese, and he'd a reading knowledge of
ancient Greek and
Latin. He served as
Bertrand Russell's interpreter when the renowned British philosopher visited China in 1920. In his
My Linguistic Autobiography, he wrote of his ability to pick up a Chinese dialect quickly, without much effort.
He returned to China in 1920, teaching at the
Tsinghua University. One year later he returned to the United States to teach at Harvard. He again returned to China in 1925, teaching at Tsinghua. He began to conduct linguistic fieldwork throughout China for the Institute of History and Philology of
Academia Sinica from 1928 onwards. During this period of time, he collaborated with
Luo Changpei and
Li Fanggui, the other two leading Chinese linguists of his generation, to edit and render into Chinese
Bernhard Karlgren's monumental
Etudes sur la Phonologie Chinoise (published in 1940).
He left for the US in 1938, and resided there afterwards. In 1945, he served as president of the
Linguistic Society of America, and a special issue of the society's journal
Language was dedicated to him in 1966. He became an American citizen in 1954.
He was married to the
physician Buwei Yang Chao, perhaps best known as author of
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, a treatise on Chinese cuisine. Yuen Ren Chao offers his insights liberally throughout the book, offering glimpses into the kind of relationship they'd together. Both were known for their good senses of humor, he particularly for his love of subtle jokes and language puns: they published a family history entitled,
Life with Chaos : the autobiography of a Chinese family.
Late in his life, he was invited by
Deng Xiaoping to return to China. Chao and his wife returned to China in 1973 for the first time since the 1940s. He visited China again between May and June in 1981 after his wife passed away in March the same year. He died in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His daughter Rulan Chao Pian (赵如兰/趙如蘭), born in 1922, is Professor Emerita of East Asian Studies and Music at Harvard.
Works
When in the US in 1921, Chao recorded the standard Mandarin pronunciation
gramophone records distributed nationally, as proposed by
Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation.
He is the author of one of the most important standard modern works on
Chinese grammar,
A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), which was translated into Chinese separately by Lü Shuxiang (吕叔湘) in 1979 and by Ting Pang-hsin (丁邦新) in 1980.
His translation of
Lewis Carroll's
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where he tried his best to preserve all the word plays of the original, is still considered a classic.
He also wrote "The "
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den". This Chinese text consists of 92 characters, all with the sounds
shī,
shí,
shǐ and
shì (the diacritics indicate the four tones of Mandarin). When written out using
Chinese characters the text can be understood, but it's incomprehensible when read out aloud, and therefore also incomprehensible on paper when written in romanized form. This example is often used as an argument against the
romanization of Chinese. However, Chao was actually pro-romanization for writing modern
vernacular Chinese; in fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of
Classical Chinese.
His composition
How could I help thinking of her (教我如何不想她 jiāo wǒ rúhé bù xiǎng tā) was a "pop hit" in the 1930s in China. The lyrics are by
Liu Bannong, another linguist, who is famous for coining the Chinese feminine pronoun
ta (她).
Chao translated "
Jabberwocky" into
Chinese by inventing characters to imitate what
Rob Gifford describes as the "slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original."
Further Information
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