Y. R. Zhao.docx

Chao Yuen Ren
Wenyu Huang
S1781979
Introduction
Chao Yuen Ren (3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982) was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born in Tianjin in 1892, and was raised in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. One of his most famous linguistic work is his book "Grammar of spoken Chinese", this book is still considered to be the best grammar of Mandarin Chinese available (LaPolla, 2006). In this paper, I will first introduce the biography of Chao and give a brief overview of Chao's important works that are related to Chinese linguistic. Among those works, four of them are selected to review in more detailed. Finally, I will come to the conclusion of why Chao is an important scholar in the history of Chinese linguistic.
Biography
Academic years in America
Chao went to the United States in 1910 to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where he met and made friend with Hu Shih. He then became interested in philosophy, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1918 with a thesis named "Continuity: Study in Methodology".
Early in his college years, he already showed his interests and talent in music and languages. He composed many musical compositions, some pieces were well-known in generations of Chinese, and are still sung by some Chinese nowadays (William, 1983). As to his language talent, he spoke fluent German and French and some Japanese, and he was able to read ancient Greek and Latin. With his talent in learning languages, he worked as an interpreter without surprise. He served as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey's interpreter while their visit in China. Later on, he published the translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1922 (LaPolla, 2006). In his book "My Linguistic Autobiography", he mentioned his ability to acquire Chinese dialects quickly and effectively, as he can hear the subtle distinctions in pronunciation (Chao, 1991). This ability enabled him to record the sounds of various dialects with a high degree of accuracy.
Teaching and researching in China
He first returned to China in 1920 for shortly a year before going back to teach at Harvard. In 1925, he returned to China again, taught at Tsinghua in the國學研究院, with王國維、梁啟超、陳寅恪. He also began a survey of the Wu dialects in 1926. In the late 1920s, when the Academia Sinica was founded, he became the head of the linguistics section of the Institute of History and Philology and began to conduct his linguistic fieldwork throughout China (LaPolla, 2006).
Back to the U.S.
In 1938, he went back to the U.S. and resided there afterward. In his stay in the U.S., he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and had become Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages. He had served as president of the Linguistic Society of America, and had received a special issue of the society's journal Language (William, 1983). In 1954, he became an American citizen and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1982.
Work
Chao had published over a hundred articles and books in Chinese and English over his lifetime, as well as several original musical compositions. His linguistic works cover an extensive range from general topics in linguistic theory to specific aspects like Chinese tones and intonation, dialects, logic, and grammar. In this section, I will briefly introduce Chao's linguistic works throughout his life by breaking them into three periods, before present the selected works in more detail.
1920-1940
In this period he had his earliest language teaching book《國語留聲片課本》, which is commissioned by The Commercial Press Limited (商務印書館). He also developed the system of National Romanization which was later on adopted by the government. Chao was one of the key members of the group that created the national language, with his invention of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme. A lot of phonetic and phonological works were done in this period, including 《國語留聲片課本》,《國語羅馬字的研究》,《中國言語字調的實驗研究法》, and《國際音標國語正音字典》. In addition, at the age of thirty-five, he started a massive scale of investigation in Chinese dialects, published《現代吳語的研究》,《方言調查表格》, 《廣西瑤歌記音》, and 《鍾祥方言記》(天主教輔仁大學語言學研究所-趙元任先生生平).
1940-1960
In 1940 he continued his research on Chinese phonetic and published 《中國音韻學
研究》together with 羅常培、李方桂. He also composed teaching materials in this period for his course at Harvard, the《粵語入門》（Cantonese Primer）. Based on the framework of Cantonese Primer, he published the《國語入門》（Mandarin Primer）on the next year. In these books, he used the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization to present the language, avoiding the use of tonal symbols. More studies on Chinese dialects were also produced, like 《中國的語言和方言》（Languages and Dialects in China）, 《湖北方言調查報告》, and《中山方言》.
1960-1980
In 1965 he finished another research on Chinese dialects, Jixi dialect, and published the book《績溪嶺北方言》, which is the study of one of the three variety of the Jixi dialect, spoken in Anhui province.
In 1968, Chao composed Language and symbolic systems and A grammar of spoken
Chinese. The Language and symbolic systems deals a wide range of linguistic aspects including the definition of language, linguistics and the study of phonetics, grammar, meaning, writing, as well as historical linguistic, language technology and the classification of languages. The Grammar of spoken Chinese consists the detailed description of Chinese grammar using structural linguistics method, which was later on translated into Chinese separately by Lü Shuxiang and by Ting Pang-hsin.
In 1970, The《上古音討論集》 which Chao finished together with Bernhard Karlgren, was published. The book discusses the characteristics and the reconstruction of ancient Chinese.
In 1976, the Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Essays by Yuan Ren Chao was published. This collection of Chao's are arranged into four sections: Chinese Language and Dialects; Divergence and Unification; Interlingual Perspectives; Philosophical Perspectives; and Structural Perspectives (Chao, 1976).
Finally, the《語言問題》was republished by The Commercial Press Limited (商務印書館). The book is the collection of Chao's speech on linguistic and linguistic related topics, including the studies of dialects, phonetic, grammar, historical linguistics, and second language acquisition (趙元任, 1968).
Selected works
In this section, I will introduce four works from Chao including Gwoyeu Romatzyh Romanization, Studies of the modern Wu dialects, Language and symbolic systems, and A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Those studies are chosen because, in the commentary of William (1983), Friedrich (1969), and LaPolla (2006), they are all mentioned and considered to be the valuable and influential works that represent his contribution to Chinese linguistics.
Gwoyeu Romatzyh Romanization
Chao has been trained to listen, differentiate, record, and pronounce IPA, therefore, was selected by the government to establish the official standard language of the nation. He proposed the Gwoyeu Romatzyh Romanization with scholars including Li-Jinxi, Lin-Yutang, and Qian-Xuantong, and this proposal was adopted by the government.
Although the system was adopted by the government in 1928, the complicated spelling system stopped it from being widely used in China. Gwoyeu Romatzyh is the only alphabetic system that presents Chinese without the mark of tones. The initials are mostly the same as in pinyin, only with a few exceptions. Like in pinyin z and c are represented in Romatzyh by tz and ts. The final system has more differences, here is one important variation: Romatzyh uses y for the final Pinyin writes as i after certain initials, as in Pinyin zhi (Romatzyh jy), chi (Romatzyh chy), shi (Romatzyh shy), ri (Romatzyh ry), zi (Romatzyh tzy), ci (Romatzyh tsy), and si (Romatzyh sy). The most important feature of Gwoyeu Romatzyh is the tonal spelling system because no diacritic marks are used to indicate tones (McGinnis, 1997). Instead of using diacritic marks, tones are actually spelled into each syllable in Chao's spelling system. Briefly speaking, the 1st tone is marked with basic form; the 2nd with r, u, i or iu after vowels; 3rd is marked with the duplication of certain vowels or changing in the medial or ending; 4th with the ending of h, y, w, nn, ll. For example, tang- tang1，tarng- tang2，taang- tang3，tanq- tang4.
After building the Gwoyeu Romatzyh Romanization, He also published a few works related to the principles and the weakness of the system. A well-known example is his poem "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den", see below.
《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。
"Shī Shì shí shī shǐ"
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
-Ren, Queiroz, Lu, de Oliveira Silva & Salimena (2014).
The text consists of 92 characters, with only one combination of consonant and vowel "shi" pronounced in four lexical tones in Chinese (shī, shí, shǐ and shì). What we can see from the text is that it is not understandable when reading out or reading the Romanization, but when written down using Chinese characters the text can be understood. There are two perceptions on why Chao wrote the poem. One argument is that Chao was opposing the use of the romanization system in Chinese. Another perception is that he was, in fact, supporting the system by creating such an extreme context in which the Romanization does not work (晏鸿鸣, 2005). Thus, Chao might be against the romanization of Classical Chinese but was actually for the romanization modern Chinese; The second argument is considered to be more conceivable since he was one of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh.
Studies of the modern Wu dialects
Chao investigated the Wu dialect in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and used the modern linguistic method to record analyse the dialect. There are two parts 吳音 and 吳語in his work, where he used IPA to record the dialect. He accomplished the basic design of dialect surveys which were to guide teams of investigators and cover large regions of China. By conducting the survey and publishing the work, he built the foundation for the study of Wu dialects and is often regarded as a classic in the field (LaPolla, 2006). It is considered to be the first detailed phonetic report on a dialect spoken in an important speech area of central China.
Language and symbolic systems
In this book, Chao discussed more basic topics about language in general as well as specific aspects like phonetics or grammar. He first explained the concept of language and linguistics, with their definitions and characteristics. He stated that "Language is a conventional system of habitual vocal behaviour by which members of a community communicate with one another" (Chao, 1968. p.1) And he defined linguistics as the study of language. The following sections are phonetics, phonemics vocabulary, and grammar, meaning, change in language, language of the world, writing, language and life, language in contact, language technology, and finally the symbolic systems. From the name of those sections, we can see that this book deals with many aspects of language in general, from the basic theory to explicit fields. Chao claimed that the book was written for the general readers as he wished to place language as a part of life (Chao, 1968). Therefore, the book starts with the fundamental part of knowing languages and the study of languages.
"It is probably the first general book by a linguist that includes intelligent discussions of such language technology topics as speech synthesis and machine translation, as well as the usual coverage of descriptive and historical linguistics (William, 1983)." This explained why the book has reached out to audiences not only in the linguistic field but also historical, philosophic, and people with other specialties.
A Grammar of Spoken Chinese
Chao wrote this grammar book in English, in order to reach an international readership. There are eight chapters in the book including the introduction, the sentence, word and morpheme, morphological types, syntactical types, compounds, parts of speech substantives, and the last part verbs and other parts of the speech. Here I will introduce the first two chapters to provide the basic framework of the book.
In the first chapter, he defined what grammar is and introduced various categories of grammar, such as descriptive and prescriptive grammar and structural grammar. He also pointed out the dialects and styles studied in this book, which is the dialect of Peiping in the middle of the twentieth century, spoken in an informal, casual style. A major part of this chapter sheds light on the introduction of Chinese phonology, including the syllabic structure and stress.
The second chapter introduced different sentence types like minor sentences, full sentences, and compound sentences, as well as the types of subjects and predicates in various sentences. He explained that full sentences consist of two: subject and predicate, and are usually used to descript or question. On the other hand, minor sentences are often used in situations like demanding, calling, or replying and can be formed by verbal or nominal expressions.
This book provides a detailed description and analysis in Chinese, it is considered a grammar work on the basis of structural linguistics. The method emphasizes more on the accurate identification of syntactic and lexical form than the meaning and historical development of a language. However, Chao was not limited to this methodology of focusing on syntax and lexical. He collected the materials that were actively used by Chinese speakers, aimed his attention at genuine Chinese data. Therefore, his analysis combines the structural and semantic factors, avoids the drawback of structural linguistics that often neglects the semantic aspect. The book still serves as a good and important reference grammar and will surely remain useful for years to come.
Significances
Chao was a pioneer in many different fields, his studies included physics, mathematics, linguistics, musical and literary composition, and translation. And why is he considered to be a significant linguist in the history of Chinese linguistic?
Chao mastered the western linguistic theory and applied it to his Chinese studies. He did not just simply placed Chinese into the western linguistic theory but adjusted the methodology by investigating and analysing by himself. He collected a great amount of authentic materials and discovered the differences between Chinese and Indo-European languages. Therefore, the theory and methodology were extended and enriched through his study.
Chao is also considered to be one of the first scholars who studied Chinese and Chinese dialects in a scientific systematic method. For designed and arranged all the survey to accomplish the studies on Chinese dialects he had done. Yue (2001) states the importance of the dialects data collected by Chao. The data is considered to be the first accurate phonetic record of different Chinese dialects in the early 20th century. Yue (2001) comments that "these materials serve as landmarks in the periodization of modern phonological changes in Chinese dialectology. They also play the role of checking and affirming the value of earlier "less professional" materials most frequently compiled by missionaries" (p. 197).
Chao's achievements received a high rate from Chinese and foreign scholars, Princeton University introduced him as one of the founders of the Chinese Science Society and made outstanding contributions to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research helped not only westerners but also speakers of Chinese to better understand Chinese language and the method of studying the Chinese language.
References
Chao, Y. R. (1965). A grammar of spoken Chinese. Univ of California Press.
Chao, Y. R. (1968). Language and symbolic systems. CUP Archive.
Chao, Y. R. (1976). Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics: Essays by Yuen Ren Chao. A. S. Dil
(Ed.). Stanford University Press.
Chao, Y. R. (1991). My linguistic autobiography. First Person Singular II:
Autobiographies by North American scholars in the language sciences, 61, 47.
Chin, A. C. (2009). The verb GIVE and the double-object construction in Cantonese in
synchronic, diachronic and typological perspectives. Unpublished Ph. D Dissertation, University of Washington.
Friedrich, P. (1969). LINGUISTICS: Language and Symbolic Systems. Yuen Ren
Chao. American Anthropologist, 71(1), 142-143.
Karlgren, B. & Chao, Y. R. (1970). 上古音討論集
Karlgren, B., Chao, Y. R., 羅常培, & 李方桂. (2007). Zhongguo yin yun xue yan jiu. 北京中
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LaPolla, R. J. (2006). Chao Yuen Ren (1892–1982).
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Chinese. The Modern Language Journal, 81(2), 228-236.
Strazny, P. (Ed.). (2013). Encyclopedia of linguistics. Routledge.
Ren, C. Y., Queiroz, J., Lu, C. Y., de Oliveira Silva, G., & Salimena, M. (2014). Tradução
Intersemiótica do 'Poeta Comedor de Leões no Covil de Pedra'–施氏食獅史. Scientia
Traductionis, (15), 380-390.
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Yuen Ren Chao. (1982). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 12(2), 113-114.
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Yue, A. O. (2001). The historic role of the late Professor YR Chao's 1929 field
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趙元任. (1968). 語言問題. 臺灣商務印書館.
晏鸿鸣. (2005). 《 施氏食狮史》 不能证明汉字不宜拼音化. 语文教学与研究: 综合天地,
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