| Yuen Ren Chao | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 3, 1892 Tianjin, China |
| Died | February 25, 1982 (aged 89) Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | linguist, composer |
| Spouse(s) | Buwei Yang Chao (1921-1981) |
| Yuen Ren Chao | |
|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese: | 趙元任 |
| Simplified Chinese: | 赵元任 |
Yuen Ren Chao (November 3, 1892 - February 25, 1982) was a Chinese American linguist and amateur composer. Events 644 - Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph, is killed by a Persian slave in Medina. Year 1892 ( MDCCCXCII) was a Leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Leap year ( Postal map spelling: Tientsin) is the second largest city in northern coastal China. China ( Wade-Giles ( Mandarin) Chung¹kuo² is a cultural region, an ancient Civilization, and depending on perspective a National Events 138 - The Emperor Hadrian adopts Antoninus Pius, effectively making him his successor Year 1982 ( MCMLXXXII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar) Cambridge Massachusetts is a City in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. Employment is a Contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. Buwei Yang Chao (née Buwei Yang Chinese: 楊步偉 (1889 - 1981 was an American Chinese physician writer of recipes and wife of the eminent Events 644 - Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim Caliph, is killed by a Persian slave in Medina. Year 1892 ( MDCCCXCII) was a Leap year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Leap year Events 138 - The Emperor Hadrian adopts Antoninus Pius, effectively making him his successor Year 1982 ( MCMLXXXII) was a Common year starting on Friday (link displays the 1982 Gregorian calendar) Chinese Americans ( Chinese: 华裔美国人 are Americans of Chinese descent Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit study or science without formal training or pay A composer (literally meaning 'one who puts together' is a person who creates Music, usually in the medium of notation, for Interpretation and Performance He made important contributions to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language.
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. Gwoyeu Romatzyh (literally "National Romanization " abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet A tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word
Contents |
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. ( Postal map spelling: Tientsin) is the second largest city in northern coastal China. Changzhou ( formerly known as Chang-chou Changchow is a Prefecture-level city in southern Jiangsu province, People's Republic of China. ( Postal map spelling: Kiangsu) is a province of the People's Republic of China, located along the east coast of the country The Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program ( was a Scholarship program funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnity money paid to the United States Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language 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. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. He served as Bertrand Russell's interpreter when the renowned British philosopher visited China in 1920. Bertrand Arthur William Russell 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970 was a British Philosopher, Historian 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. Tsinghua University ( THU;) is a University in Beijing, People's Republic of China. 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. The Academia Sinica ( "Chinese Academy" in Latin) headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the National academy 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). Luo Changpei ( Chinese: 羅常培/罗常培 Courtesy name: Xintian 莘田 ( 1899 - 1958) was a Chinese linguist Bernhard Karlgren (1889 - 1978 was a Swedish sinologist, Philologist, and the founder of Swedish sinology as a scholarly discipline
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. The Linguistic Society of America (LSA is a professional society for linguists 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. A physician, medical practitioner or medical doctor who practices Medicine, and is concerned with maintaining or restoring human Health Buwei Yang Chao (née Buwei Yang Chinese: 楊步偉 (1889 - 1981 was an American Chinese physician writer of recipes and wife of the eminent Yuen Ren Chao offers his insights liberally throughout the book, offering glimpses into the kind of relationship they had 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. Deng Xiaoping ( 22 August 1904 19 February 1997) was a prominent Chinese Revolutionary, Politician, Pragmatist and Reformer 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. Cambridge Massachusetts is a City in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. 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. The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會 Pinyin: Dúyīn Tǒngyī Huì was established in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1913
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. This article describes the grammar of Standard Mandarin. For the grammars of other forms of Chinese see their respective articles via links on Chinese language It was an expansion of the grammar chapters in his earlier textbooks, Mandarin Primer and Cantonese Primer. He was co-author of the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese, which was the first dictionary to mark Chinese characters for being bound (only used in polysyllables) or free (permissible as a monosyllabic word).
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. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (ˈdɒdsən (27 January 1832 &ndash 14 January 1898 better known by the Pen name Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/ was an English Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865 is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson better known under the Pseudonym Lewis
He also wrote "The "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den". The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den ( is a famous example of Constrained writing by Yuen Ren Chao which consists of 92 characters all with the sound shi 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 is incomprehensible when read out aloud, and therefore also incomprehensible on paper when written in romanized form. Written Chinese comprises the written symbols used to represent Spoken Chinese and the rules about how they are arranged and punctuated This example is often used as an argument against the romanization of Chinese. The Romanization of Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to write Chinese In fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of Classical Chinese and Chao was actually pro-romanization for writing modern vernacular Chinese (he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh). Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the Written Chinese Language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Gwoyeu Romatzyh (literally "National Romanization " abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet
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). Liu Bannong (劉半農 or Liu Fu (劉復 (1891 - 1934 was a Chinese linguist and poet
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. " Jabberwocky " is a Poem of Nonsense verse written by Lewis Carroll, originally featured as a part of his novel Through the Looking-Glass Rob Gifford was National Public Radio 's China Correspondent from 1999 to 2005 "[1]
References
- ^ Gifford, Rob. Rob Gifford was National Public Radio 's China Correspondent from 1999 to 2005 "The Great Wall of the Mind. " China Road. 237.
- 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
- Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author, Yuen Ren Chao, interview conducted by Rosemany Levenson, Bancroft Library
- (Chinese) Chao's gallery, with related essays, at Tsinghua's site
- (Chinese) Biography at Guoxue
- Yuen Ren Society for Chinese dialectology
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