Yuen Ren Chao
Encyclopedia
Chao Yuen Ren 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.
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 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. In the 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research
. From 1947 to 1960, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1952, he became Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages.
He was married to the physician
Yang Buwei, perhaps best known as author of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, a treatise on Chinese cuisine. 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. 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 died 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.
pronunciation gramophone record
s 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. 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).
General Chinese
(通字) is a phonetic system he invented to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese
simultaneously. It is not specifically a romanization system, but two alternate systems: one uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary
, and the other is an alphabetic romanization system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh
. Chao also made a contribution to the International Phonetic Alphabet
with his system of writing syllabic pitch shapes (sometimes referred to as "Chao letters").
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 is incomprehensible when read out aloud in Standard Chinese, and therefore also incomprehensible on paper when written in romanized form. This example is often used as an argument against the romanization of Chinese
. In fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of Classical Chinese
and Chao was actually for the romanization modern vernacular written Chinese; he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh
.
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."
Chinese American
Chinese Americans represent Americans of Chinese descent. Chinese Americans constitute one group of overseas Chinese and also a subgroup of East Asian Americans, which is further a subgroup of Asian Americans...
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....
and amateur
Amateur
An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training....
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
. He made important contributions to the modern study of Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
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 grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
.
Besides helping to shape the Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...
, a Chinese romanization scheme, Chao is also credited with inventing a notation for transcribing tonal pitch variation
Tone contour
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. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia.-Themes:When the...
in spoken languages.
Biography
Born in TianjinTianjin
' is a metropolis in northern China and one of the five national central cities of the People's Republic of China. It is governed as a direct-controlled municipality, one of four such designations, and is, thus, under direct administration of the central government...
with ancestry in Changzhou
Changzhou
Changzhou is a prefecture-level city in southern Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It was previously known as Yanling, Lanling, Jinling, and Wujin. Located on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, Changzhou borders the provincial capital of Nanjing to the west, Zhenjiang to the...
, Jiangsu Province
Jiangsu
' is a province of the People's Republic of China, located along the east coast of the country. The name comes from jiang, short for the city of Jiangning , and su, for the city of Suzhou. The abbreviation for this province is "苏" , the second character of its name...
, Chao went to the United States with a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship in 1910 to study mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, switching to philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
later. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
Already in college, his interests had turned to music and languages. He spoke German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
fluently and some Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, and he had a reading knowledge of ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
. He served as Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
'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
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...
. 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
Academia Sinica
The Academia Sinica , headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. It supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from mathematical and physical sciences, to life sciences, and to humanities and social sciences.Academia Sinica has...
from 1928 onwards. During this period of time, he collaborated with Luo Changpei
Luo Changpei
Luo Changpei was a Chinese linguist. He made important contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology. He was also a pioneer of the modern studies of Chinese dialects and of non-Chinese languages in China....
and Li Fanggui
Li Fanggui
Li Fang-Kuei was a Chinese linguist. He resided in the United States after 1938.-Biography:Li was one of the first Chinese to study linguistics outside China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He gained a BA in linguistics at...
, the other two leading Chinese linguists of his generation, to edit and render into Chinese Bernhard Karlgren
Bernhard Karlgren
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods...
'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
Linguistic Society of America
The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
, and a special issue of the society's journal Language was dedicated to him in 1966. He became an American citizen in 1954. In the 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research
Society for General Systems Research
The Society for General Systems Research is predecessor of the current International Society for the Systems Sciences , known to be one the first interdisciplinary and international co-operations in the field of systems theory and systems science...
. From 1947 to 1960, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1952, he became Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages.
He was married to the physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
Yang Buwei, perhaps best known as author of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, a treatise on Chinese cuisine. 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
Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...
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 died in March the same year. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. 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.
Work
When in the US in 1921, Chao recorded the Standard ChineseStandard Chinese
Standard Chinese, or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....
pronunciation gramophone record
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
s distributed nationally, as proposed by Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation
Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation
The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was established in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin, and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.- History :It was decided in a draft on August 7, 1912, a month...
.
He is the author of one of the most important standard modern works on Chinese grammar
Chinese grammar
Standard Chinese shares a similar system of grammar with the many language varieties or dialects of the Chinese language, different from those employed by other language families, and comparable to the similar features found within the Slavic languages or Semitic languages...
, 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. 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).
General Chinese
General Chinese
General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published"...
(通字) is a phonetic system he invented to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese
Varieties of Chinese
Chinese comprises many regional language varieties sometimes grouped together as the Chinese dialects, the primary ones being Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, and Min. These are not mutually intelligible, and even many of the regional varieties are themselves composed of a number of...
simultaneously. It is not specifically a romanization system, but two alternate systems: one uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...
, and the other is an alphabetic romanization system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...
. Chao also made a contribution to the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
with his system of writing syllabic pitch shapes (sometimes referred to as "Chao letters").
His translation of Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures...
, 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
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 in different tones when read in Mandarin....
". 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 in Standard Chinese, and therefore also incomprehensible on paper when written in romanized form. This example is often used as an argument against the romanization of Chinese
Romanization of Chinese
The romanization of Mandarin Chinese is the use of the Latin alphabet to write Chinese. Because Chinese is a tonal language with a logographic script, its characters do not represent phonemes directly. There have been many systems of romanization throughout history...
. In fact, the text was an argument against the romanization of Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
and Chao was actually for the romanization modern vernacular written Chinese; he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh , abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR...
.
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
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...
, another linguist, who is famous for coining the Chinese feminine pronoun ta (她).
Chao translated Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense verse poem written by Lewis Carroll in his 1872 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
into Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
by inventing characters to imitate what Rob Gifford
Rob Gifford
Rob Gifford is a British-born radio correspondent. He has degrees in Chinese Studies from Durham University and in Regional Studies from Harvard University. He began to learn Mandarin Chinese in 1987 whilst in China....
describes as the "slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original."
Further reading
- Chao Yuen Ren, "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 JSTORJSTORJSTOR is an online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides its member institutions full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society...
External links
- Biography at Cornell's site
- Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author, Yuen Ren Chao, interview conducted by Rosemany Levenson, Bancroft Library Chao's gallery, with related essays, at Tsinghua's site Biography at Guoxue
- Yuen Ren Society for Chinese dialectology