Wang Li or Wang Liaoyi (王了一), (1900–1986) was a Chinese

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

.

Born into a poor but educated family in Bobai (博白), Yulin, Guangxi

Yulin, Guangxi

Yulin is one of the fourteen prefecture-level cities of Guangxi autonomous region, in China.-Geography and climate:Yulin is located in southeastern Guangxi province along the border with Guangdong. It is a hilly basin with a total area of 12,838 sq. km....

, he was largely self-taught before entering the Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University , colloquially known in Chinese as Qinghua, is a university in Beijing, China. The school is one of the nine universities of the C9 League. It was established in 1911 under the name "Tsinghua Xuetang" or "Tsinghua College" and was renamed the "Tsinghua School" one year later...

 in 1927. There he was taught by Yuen Ren Chao

Yuen Ren Chao

Chao Yuen Ren was a Chinese American linguist and amateur composer. He made important contributions to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar....

 and Liang Qichao

Liang Qichao

Liang Qichao |Styled]] Zhuoru, ; Pseudonym: Rengong) was a Chinese scholar, journalist, philosopher and reformist during the Qing Dynasty , who inspired Chinese scholars with his writings and reform movements...

, among others. Encouraged by Chao, he went to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 to study linguistics in 1927. There he devoted himself to the study of phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

, and attended the class of Theoretical linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics...

 by Joseph Vendryes

Joseph Vendryes

Joseph Vendryes was a French-Celtic linguist. After studying with Antoine Meillet, he was chairman of Celtic languages and literature at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He founded the journal Études Celtiques...

. He got his PhD from the University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

 with his experiments done on the tones

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 of the Bobai dialect, following the line of Liu Bannong

Liu Bannong

Liu Bannong or Liu Fu was a Chinese linguist and poet.A native of Jiangsu, he was an important contributor to the influential magazine La Jeunesse during the May Fourth Movement...

.

To eke out a living, he translated works of French literature into Chinese during his stint in Paris. He would translate more after his return to China, including the plays of Molière

Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...

, and a version of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in classical Chinese verse.

He returned to China in 1932, and began his academic career. Before the Second Sino-Japanese War

Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...

, he taught in the Tsinghua University. From 1939 to 1940, he studied in the École française d'Extrême-Orient

École française d'Extrême-Orient

The École française d'Extrême-Orient is a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies. Translated into English, it approximately means the French School of the Far East. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in what was then French Indochina. After independence, its...

 in Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...

, learning the Vietnamese language

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

, which aided his study of historical Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology

Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European...

. In 1946, he began to teach in the Zhongshan University. One of his students there was Michael Halliday

Michael Halliday

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential model of language, the systemic functional linguistic model. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar .-Biography:Halliday was born and raised in England...

. In 1948, he switched to the Lingnan University

Lingnan University (Guangzhou)

Lingnan University in Canton, Kwangtung Province, China , was a private university established by a group of American missionaries in 1888. At its founding it was named Canton Christian College .It was incorporated into Chung Shan University in 1953...

. In 1954, he began to teach in the Peking University

Peking University

Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...

, until his death.

He called his study "Study where both dragons and worms are carved" (龍蟲並雕齋), which indicates the fact that he, as a prolific writer, produced highly technical theses as well as popular textbooks and essays. His important works include:

• Hanyu Shigao (漢語史稿 "A sketch of the history of the Chinese language")
• Hanyu Shilüxue (漢語詩律學 "The study of the metrical rules of Chinese poetry")
• Tongyuan Zidian (同源字典 "A dictionary of word families [in the Chinese language]")

External links

Biography and bibliography, with related essays and memoirs
中国古代文化常识, with related essays and memoirs