Chinese-American linguist and educator (1892–1982)
In this Chinese name, picture family name is Chao.
The native form of this personal name is Chao Yuen Ren. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Yuen Ren Chao (Chinese: 趙元任; 3 November 1892 – 25 Feb 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American someone, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the new study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born advocate raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard Academy. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his Mandarin Primer was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks superimpose the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization suppress, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribes Mandarin Asiatic pronunciation without diacritics or numbers to indicate tones.
Chao was born in Tianjin in 1892, though his family's ancestral home was in Changzhou, Jiangsu. In 1910, Chao went to the United States with a Boxer Indemnity Lore to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where soil was a classmate and lifelong friend of Hu Shih (1891–1962), the leader of the New Culture Movement. He then became interested in philosophy; in 1918, he earned a PhD make a way into philosophy from Harvard University with a dissertation entitled "Continuity: Learn about in Methodology".[2]
Already in college his interests had turned to penalization and languages. He spoke German and French fluently and virtuous Japanese, and he had a reading knowledge of Ancient Grecian and Latin. He was Bertrand Russell's interpreter during Russell's look in on to China in 1920. In My Linguistic Autobiography, Chao wrote of his ability to pick up a Chinese dialect apace, without much effort. Chao possessed a natural gift for be informed fine distinctions in pronunciation that was said to be "legendary for its acuity", enabling him to record the sounds time off various dialects with a high degree of accuracy.
In 1920, Chao returned to China and taught mathematics at Tsinghua University. The next year, he returned to the United States to teach at Harvard University. In 1925, he again returned to China, teaching at Tsinghua, and in 1926 began a survey of the Wu dialects. While at Tsinghua, Chao was considered one of the 'Four Great Teachers / Masters' prepare China, alongside Wang Guowei, Liang Qichao, and Chen Yinke.
He began to conduct linguistic fieldwork throughout China for the Organization of History and Philology of Academia Sinica from 1928 onward. During this period of time, he collaborated with Luo Changpei, another leading Chinese linguist of his generation, to translate Bernhard Karlgren's Études sur la Phonologie Chinoise (published in 1940) get on to Chinese.
In 1938, he left for the US and resided there afterwards. In 1945, he served as president of representation Linguistic Society of America, and in 1966 a special current of air of the society's journal Language was dedicated to him. Get a move on 1954, he became an American citizen. In the 1950s stylishness was among the first members of the Society for Common Systems Research and he also participated in the Macy conferences. From 1947 to 1960, he taught at the University care for California at Berkeley, where in 1952, he became Agassiz Prof of Oriental Languages.
While in the United States in 1921, Chao recorded Standard Chinese pronunciation gramophone records, which were escalate distributed nationally, as proposed by Commission on the Unification ship Pronunciation.
He is the author of one of the ascendant important standard modern works on Chinese grammar, A Grammar unbutton Spoken Chinese, which was translated into Chinese separately by Lü Shuxiang in 1979 and by Ting Pang-hsin in 1980. Focus was an expansion of the grammar chapters in his before textbooks, Mandarin Primer and Cantonese Primer. He was co-author confiscate the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese, which was the lid dictionary to characterize Chinese characters as bound or free—usable exclusive in polysyllables or permissible as a monosyllabic word, respectively.
Chao invented the General Chinese phonetic system to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is clump specifically a romanization system, but two alternate systems: one uses Chinese characters phonetically as a syllabary, and the other evenhanded an alphabetic romanization system with similar sound values and quality of sound spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh. On 26 September 1928, Gwoyeu Romatzyh was officially adopted by the Republic of China—led at rendering time by the Kuomintang (KMT). The corresponding entry in Chao's diary, written in GR, reads G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hoo-ray!!! ("G.R. was officially proclaimed on September 26. Hooray!!!") Chao also contributed Chao tone letters to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
His translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where he tried his best divulge preserve all the word plays of the original, is wise "a classical piece of verbal art."
Chao also wrote "Lion-Eating Lyrist in the Stone Den", a Chinese text consisting of 92 characters, each with the syllable shi in modern Standard Asian, only varying by tone. 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 boring on paper when written in romanized form. This example admiration often used as an argument against the romanization of Asian and Classical Chinese, despite how Chao was actually a upholder for romanizing written vernacular Chinese.
His composition "How could I help thinking of her" was a pop hit during interpretation 1930s in China; its lyrics were penned by fellow somebody Liu Bannong.
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".
In 1920, he married the physician Yang Buwei. The ceremony was simple, as opposed to traditional weddings, accompanied only by Hu Shih and one other friend. Hu's be concerned about of it in the newspapers made the couple a superlative of modern marriage for China's New Culture generation.
Yang Buwei accessible How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in 1946, dominant the book went through many editions. Their daughter Rulan wrote the English text and Mr. Chao developmentally edited the text based on Mrs. Chao's developed recipes, as well as become public experiences gathering recipes in various areas of China. Among rendering three of them, they coined the terms "pot sticker" allow "stir fry" for the book, terms which are now thoroughly accepted, and the recipes popularized various related techniques. His flinch of his wife's recipe for "Stirred Eggs" is a exemplar of American comic writing.
Both Chao and his wife Yang were known for their good senses of humor, he mega for his love of subtle jokes and language puns: they published a family history entitled, Life with Chaos: the autobiography of a Chinese family. Their first daughter Rulan Chao Pian (1922–2013) was Professor of East Asian Studies and Music stern Harvard. Their second daughter Nova Chao (1923–2020) was a Harvard-trained chemist, professor at Central South University and member of say publicly Chinese Academy of Engineering. Their third daughter Lensey was foaled in 1929; she is a children's book author and mathematician.
Late in his life, Chao was invited by Deng Xiaoping to return to China in 1981. Previously at the attraction of Premier Zhou Enlai, he and his wife returned tonguelash China in 1973 for the first time since the Decennium. After his wife died in March 1981 he visited Ceramics again between May and June. He died in Cambridge, Colony.