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'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.

Contents

Life

Works

References

External links

Life

Born in Tianjin with ancestry in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, Chao went to the United States with a 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 had 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 had together.
Late in his life, he was invited by Deng Xiaoping to return to China. He met Deng in person in 1981, but did not move back to the mainland. 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 in the Wonderland'', where he tried his best to preserve all the word plays of the original, is still considered a classic. He also wrote the essay the "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den", which is often wrongly used as an argument against Romanization of Chinese (Chao was actually pro-Romanization). In fact it was an argument against Classical Chinese because it cannot be understood when read out aloud. The essay consists of 92 characters all with the sounds ''shi1'', ''shi2'', ''shi3'' and ''shi4'' (the numbers indicate the four tones of Mandarin), on paper it can be understood but incomprehensible when read out aloud, therefore also incomprehensible on paper when romanized.
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 lyric is by Liu Bannong, another linguist who is famous for coining the Chinese feminine pronoun ''ta'' (她).

References

★ Yuen Ren Chao, "My Linguistic Autobiography", in ''Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics: Essays by Yuen Ren Chao'', pp.1-20, selected and Introduced by Anwar S. Dil, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976.

★ William S-Y. Wang, "Yuen Ren Chao", ''Language'', Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1983), pp. 605-607, available through JSTOR

External links

★ Biography at Cornell's site

★ Chao's gallery, with related essays, at Tsinghua's site

★ Biography at Guoxue

★ Yuen Ren Society for Chinese dialectology