Chao Yuen Ren

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chao.

Chao Yuen Ren
Chao as a young man ca. 1916
Traditional Chinese	趙元任
Simplified Chinese	赵元任
Transcriptions Gan - Romanization ceu5 ngion4 nin5 Mandarin - Hanyu Pinyin Zhào Yuánrèn - Wade–Giles Chao Yüan-jen - IPA [tʂɑ̂ʊ ywǎnʐə̂n] - Gwoyeu Romatzyh Jaw Yuanrenn Min - Hokkien POJ Tiō Goân-jīm Cantonese (Yue) - Jyutping ziu6 jyun4 jam6 - IPA [tɕìːu jy̭ːn jɐ̀m] - Yale Romanization Jiuh Yùhn Jahm

Chao Yuen Ren
Born	November 3, 1892(1892-11-03) Tianjin, China
Died	February 25, 1982(1982-02-25) (aged 89) Cambridge, Massachusetts
Occupation	linguist, composer
Spouse(s)	Buwei Yang Chao (1921-1981)

Chao Yuen Ren (3 November 1892 – 25 February 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.

Biography

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. 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.

Work

When in the US in 1921, Chao recorded the Standard Chinese 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. 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").^[1]

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^[who?] a classic.^{[citation needed]}

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^[2] by inventing characters to imitate what Rob Gifford describes as the "slithy toves that gyred and gimbled in the wabe of Carroll's original."^[3]

References

1. ^ "UC Berkeley Phonology Lab". www.linguistics.berkeley.edu. http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/. Retrieved 2010-01-02. 
2. ^ Chao, Yuen Ren (1969). "Dimensions of Fidelity in Translation With Special Reference to Chinese". Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (Harvard-Yenching Institute) 29: 109–130. doi:10.2307/2718830. JSTOR 2718830. 
3. ^ Gifford, Rob. "The Great Wall of the Mind." China Road. 237.

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 JSTOR

External links

	Biography portal
	China portal
	United States portal
	Linguistics portal

• 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

Persondata
Name	Chao, Yuen Ren
Alternative names	趙元任 (Chinese)
Short description	Chinese American linguist and composer
Date of birth	3 November 1892
Place of birth	Tianjin, China
Date of death	25 February 1982
Place of death	Cambridge, Massachusetts