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Yuen Ren Chao (; Gwoyeu Romatzyh: Jaw Yuanrenn) (November 3, 1892 - February 25, 1982) was a Chinese linguist and amateur composer who shaped Gwoyeu Romatzyh and the scientific studies, especially the phonology, of the Chinese language.
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, and switched to philosophy later. He would later gain his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University.
During his college days, his interests has already turned to music and languages. He is known to have spoken German, French, and Japanese fluently, and have 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 happily writes of his ability to pick up a Chinese dialect quickly, without much effort.
In 1945, he was president of the Linguistic Society of America, and a special issue of the society's journal Language was dedicated to him in 1966.
He was married to the physician Buwei Yang Chao (née Yang Buwei; TC: 楊步偉), perhaps best known as author of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, a veritable treatise on Chinese cuisine (Asia Press, from the John Day Company), first published in 1945. Yuen Ren Chao offers his insights liberally throughout the book, and making intriguing glimpses into the kind of relationship they had together.
He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His daughter Rulan Chao Pian (TC: 趙如蘭), born in 1922, is Professor Emerita of East Asian Studies and Music at Harvard.
Works
When in U.S. 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 (呂叔湘) in 1979 and by Ting Pang Hsin (Ding Bangxin 丁邦新) in 1980, and republished in English by the Commercial Press in Beijing in 2004 (ISBN 7-100-03345-4).
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. A natural punster, 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 (TC: 《教我如何不想她》) was a "pop hit" in the 1930s in China. The lyric is by Liu Bannong (TC: 劉半農), another linguist who is famous for coining the Chinese feminine pronoun 她.
Chao is credited with inventing a notation for transcribing tonal pitch variation in spoken languages. Numerical digits 1 through to 5 inclusive are used to indicate these levels. 1 being the lowest pitch, and 5 the highest, with the other levels in between. For Chinese, which is a tone langauge, the pronunciation of a syllable in a particular tone gives adds information that a listener fluent in that language can discern. For Mandarin Chinese, there are four basic tones. The first tone /55/ indicates that a syllable of this tone begins at a high pitch, and ends with a high pitch, and this is known as a high level tone. The second tone is /35/, with the syllable pronounced in the mid pitch range and ending high. This is a mid rising tone. The third tone in Mandarin varies /213/ or /214/. It begins mid-low, falling then it rises at the end. The fourth tone is /51/. This starts with a high pitch and falls sharply to the lowest pitch. It is known as a high falling tone.
1892 births | 1982 deaths | Chinese linguists | Chinese scientists | Chinese writers | Chinese translators | Phonologists
"Yuen Ren Chao"