Chao Yuen-ren (1892-), known as Y. R. Chao, internationally known linguist. Originally concentrating on phonology, he made the first detailed recordings of major dialect areas in China, establishing the research framework for such studies. In the United States, his work covered a wide range of linguistic topics, including the application of modern linguistic methods to Chinese language teaching; he prepared the Mandarin Primer and the Cantonese Primer. Chao also translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into Chinese.

Although his ancestral home was in the Wuchin (Ch'angchou) district of Kiangsu province, Y. R. Chao was born at Tientsin in north China. His family had a scholarly tradition: one of Chao's ancestors was Chao Yi (1727-1814), the author of the Xien-erh-shih cha-chi [notes on the 22 histories]. In the last years of the Ch'ing dynasty, his grandfather held official posts in north China. In his childhood, Chao lived with his family at Peking, Paoting, and other places in Chihli (Hopei) province, and he spoke the northern dialect. When he was five, his family invited a teacher from Kiangsu to supervise his formal education, and he thus learned to recite the traditional Four Books of the Confucian canon in the Ch'angchou dialect. At the same time, he learned from an aunt to speak the Ch'angshu southern dialect. In this way, Chao first became aware of the dialectical differences in the spoken Chinese language. Chao also studied Chinese music, since both his parents were well-known amateur performers in the type of Chinese theater known as k'un-ch'u. In 1900 Chao returned with his family to Ch'angchou, where his parents both died in 1904. The following year he went to live with a relative's family at Soochow, where he continued his education under the supervision of a tutor. With his entry into the Hsi-shan Primary School at Ch'angchou in 1906, Chao began to receive a new-style education. From 1907 to 1910 he took the preparatory course of the Kiangnan Higher School at Nanking.

In 1910 Chao passed the Tsinghua government examination for study in the United States, placing second in the national ranking. In America he enrolled at Cornell University in the autumn of 1910, entering in the same class with Hu Shih (q.v.). During their undergraduate days at Ithaca, Y. R. Chao and Hu Shih established a lasting friendship. Hu Shih majored in philosophy; Chao, in mathematics and physics. Chao also began to study Western music. At Cornell, Chao roomed with M. T. Hu, one of the early Western-trained Chinese mathematicians, who later received his Ph.D. at Harvard. Both Y. R. Chao and Hu Shih received their B.A. degrees at Cornell in June 1914, after which they remained at Ithaca for a year of graduate study in philosophy. During his Cornell days, Y. R. Chao was active in organizing the Science Society of China, which was founded in 1914 with the goals of introducing Western scientific knowledge to China and of promoting scientific research. Two other Chinese students at Cornell were active in that endeavor: H. C. Zen (Jen Hung-chün, q.v.), who was studying chemistry, and Yang Ch'üan (q.v.), who was studying mechanical engineering. This group also established a journal, K'o-hsueh (Science), in 1915. For several years, Science was edited in the United States, first at Ithaca and later at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was printed in Shanghai. It was one of the longest-lived Chinese journals devoted to the advancement of science—it did not cease publication until 1950. In 1915 Y. R. Chao and Hu Shih both left Cornell. Hu Shih went to Columbia University to study philosophy under John Dewey. Chao moved to Harvard, where, in addition to physics, he studied philosophy and musical composition. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics in 1918, he spent a year on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship studying at Chicago and at Berkeley. He then returned to Ithaca, where he was instructor of physics during the academic year 1919-20. In the six years after his graduation from Cornell in 1914, Chao's papers, including many which appeared in Chinese in Science, were in the field of mathematics and physics, though he did publish a series of articles in The Chinese Students Monthly on the phonetic transcription of the Chinese language. He also began to compose music.

In 1920, after ten years of study abroad, Y. R. Chao returned to China and taught mathematics at Tsinghua University, entering the intellectual life of Peking in the heady period after the May Fourth Movement. John Dewey was then in China, and Hu Shih, as one of Dewey's leading Chinese disciples, acted as interpreter for his former teacher's lectures at Peking and elsewhere. When Bertrand Russell arrived in China in October 1920, Y. R. Chao was asked to assist him in the same manner. The intelligence and articulateness of the two young Chinese interpreters who accompanied Dewey and Russell greatly impressed Chinese audiences. Russell's philosophy and personality left a deep impression on many Chinese intellectuals of the period, and his visit also had the unforeseen result of leading his interpreter to a new professional career. When accompanying Russell on his tour of China during the winter of 1 920, Chao interpreted his lectures into various Chinese dialects with great fluency and accuracy. His linguistic flair established, Y. R. Chao, with the encouragement of friends, decided to concentrate his future studies in the field of linguistics. The following summer, Chao assumed family responsibilities, when on 1 June 1921 he married Buwei Yang (Yang Pu-wei) in a simple ceremony at Peking attended only by two close friends, Hu Shih and Chu Chun-kuo. Chao and his bride affixed their signatures to a wedding certificate which they had written themselves. Chao's wife came from a prominent family of southern Anhwei. Her grandfather, Yang Wen-hui (1837-1911; T. Jen-shan), had been known for his promotion of Buddhist studies and for his role as founder of the famous center for the circulation of Buddhist scriptures at Nanking. Although Buwei Yang came from a conservative background and had received a traditional education in her childhood, she had then gone to study in Japan, where she gained her degree in medicine. She and Chao met at Peking, where she was practicing medicine.

Shortly after their marriage, Y. R. Chao and his wife left for the United States, where Chao became instructor of Chinese at Harvard in the autumn of 1921. Although instruction in Chinese had been offered at Harvard as early as 1879, that early experiment had failed. After a lapse of 40 years, Chinese was again made part of the curriculum, and Chao came from China to teach it. Since then, Chinese has been taught continuously at Harvard. Aside from language teaching, Chao did research in phonology and musicology. Leaving Harvard in 1924, he went to Europe for a year of study and travel. In Sweden he met Bernhard Karlgren, the pioneer Western scholar of Chinese phonology, and discussed with him the possibility of translating his monumental work, Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise, which had been appearing since 1915. In 1925 Y. R. Chao returned to the faculty of Tsinghua University at Peking. In the United States he had begun making recordings of the Chinese language, and in 1925 the Commercial Press at Shanghai issued his "Phonograph Course in the Chinese National Language." During the early 1920's, Chao's professional writings were concentrated in the field of phonology. His chief concerns were the standard pronunciation of the national language, the phoneticization of Chinese ideographs, initial experiments with romanizing Chinese, and research on the problem of tones in the spoken Chinese language. In 1929 Chao also assumed the responsibility of directing the phonology division of the institute of history and philology of the Academia Sinica, and in the years before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 he was a dominant figure in scholarly research on the Chinese language.

In 1926 Chao began the investigation of modern Wu dialects spoken in the lower Yangtze valley. Ten years earlier, Karlgren had systematically recorded dialects in north China. Strictly speaking, however, Karlgren had recorded pronunciation only; he had not made a detailed study of intonation. Chao followed Karlgren's path, but his research on the Wu dialects covered the pronunciation and intonation of individual words and word groups. As a result, his work was the first detailed recording of a major dialect area in China. In 1928-29 Chao proceeded to work with the Yueh (Cantonese) dialect spoken in Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces. In 1934, working together with Lo Ch'ang-p'ei (q.v.), he conducted an investigation of the Hui-chou dialect spoken in southern Anhwei.

In 1935 Y. R. Chao changed the framework of his research on Chinese dialects. He set out to record as many dialects as possible, attempting to make the material on each dialect as precise as possible with a view to distinguishing the basic characteristics of particular dialects. He hoped, under this revised plan, to complete preliminary investigations on the distribution of the various Chinese dialects within a reasonably short period of time. Chao himself conducted the investigations of the Kiangsi and Hunan dialects in 1935 and of the Hupeh dialects the following year. In addition to his fellow linguist Li Fang-kuei, several assistants trained by Chao participated in this field work. The investigation of dialects in a province usually was completed within one month. The research framework established by Y. R. Chao and his associates during the 1930's set the essential intellectual pattern that guided the later work of the Academia Sinica in that field. The general investigation of dialects throughout China even after 1949 under Communist auspices has been pursued according to the methods established by Chao.

In addition to extensive investigations, Y. R. Chao also encouraged detailed recording and focused research on individual dialects, supplemented by recordings. The method is exemplified in his study, Chung-hsiang fang-yen chi [record of the chung-hsiang dialect], which appeared in 1939. In addition to recording Chinese dialects, he made phonetic transcriptions of the Tibetan language and songs in the Yao dialect, work set forth in his Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama and Phonetics of Yao Folksongs, both of which appeared in 1929. While engaged in these studies, Chao carefully established archives of recordings at the Academia Sinica. Bernhard Karlgren's Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise is generally regarded as being the foundation of modern scientific research on the Chinese language. The value of that monumental study did not become clear in China, however, until the appearance of the translation and revision of the work undertaken by Y. R. Chao, Li Fang-kuei, and Lo Ch'ang-p'ei. That translation embodied precision and deep knowledge, and its scholarly value was enhanced by the additional material.

Y. R. Chao also produced many professional papers on a variety of linguistic topics. His inquiries ranged from problems of phonetic transcription of the Chinese language, Chinese dialects, and the Chinese national language to comparative studies of Chinese and English and problems in the field of general linguistic analysis. Chao's pioneer effort to provide intonation symbols offered an important tool to scholars of Chinese and of other tonal languages. His essay entitled "The Non-Uniqueness of Phonetic Solutions of Phonetic Systems" is an important contribution to modern theoretical linguistics. In addition to professional research, Chao served as adviser to the language education program conducted by the ministry of education of the National Government and assisted earlyefforts in China to use radio in language teaching. Y. R. Chao's unusual versatility was particularly obvious in the years before the outbreak of the Japanese war. The period was his most creative as a composer: his Songs of Contemporary Chinese Poems appeared in 1928, and his Children's Festival Songs, in 1934. Virtually all Chinese music students know Chao's songs. His chapter on music in the Symposium on Chinese Culture (1931), edited by Sophia H. Zen (Ch'en Hengche, q.v.), is an excellent general survey of traditional Chinese musicology. Also, Chao's keen linguistic sense found expression in translating. An early effort was his Chinese rendering of A. A. Milne's one-act comedy, The Camberley Triangle, which appeared in 1925. But it was in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that Chao found a work truly worthy of his talents. In the Chinese version, which appeared in January 1922, the style and whimsical wit of the translator reportedly match those of Lewis Carroll himself. Chao also completed a Chinese translation of Through the Looking Glass, but the manuscript was lost during the war. In the autumn of 1938, Chao left China to accept a teaching post at the University of Hawaü. From 1939 to 1941 he taught at Yale University. In 1941 he went to Harvard, where he worked on the Chinese-English dictionary project of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Chao later directed the Chinese language program of the School for Overseas Administration which was established at Harvard during the Second World War. Through his work at Harvard Chao had a major influence on the teaching of Chinese in the United States and helped to lay the foundations for the rapid expansion since 1945 of the study of that language. His most important contribution lay in the application of modern linguistic methods to Chinese language teaching. Chao's Concise Dictionary ofSpoken Chinese, prepared in collaboration with Yang Lien-sheng of the department of Far Eastern languages at Harvard, was published by the Harvard University Press in 1947, as was his Cantonese Primer. In 1948, Harvard published his Mandarin Primer: an Intensive Course in Spoken Chinese, which has received wide acceptance both in the United States and abroad.

Despite its brevity, the introductory section in the Mandarin Primer is a thorough, technical introduction to modern Chinese linguistics and a significant step forward in the analysis of the grammar of modern Chinese. Previous grammatical studies of both classical and modern Chinese had been based upon written language materials. Chao, in contrast, discussed the grammar of the Chinese language spoken in everyday life in China. Furthermore, most grammarians before Chao had explained Chinese grammar by using Western grammatical rules, some of them merely borrowing concepts used by Otto Jespersen. In his Mandarin Primer, Chao systematically applied the principles and methods of modern descriptive linguistics to the Chinese language. In addition, the notes appended to the lesson materials offer penetrating explanations of many grammatical phenomena. Chao's major contributions were recognized in 1945, when he was elected president of the Linguistic Society of America. He received an honorary D.Litt. degree from Princeton at its bicentennial celebration in 1946; and in 1947 he was elected to membership in the Academia Sinica. That year he left Cambridge for the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a professor of Oriental languages and linguistics. He became Agassiz Professor in 1952 and held that chair until his retirement from the faculty in 1960. He was president of the American Oriental Society and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of California.

Although he lived abroad after 1938, Y. R. Chao continued to serve China. From 1945 to 1947 he served as Chinese representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The work on linguistics of the institute of history and philology of the Academia Sinica continued to be conducted under his intellectual guidance. Chao went to Taiwan as a Fulbright research scholar in January 1959 to lecture on general linguistics at National Taiwan University and to chair a series of professional discussions on Chinese grammar. The visit of Chao and his wife was a major social and intellectual event in Taipei, and their activities during the three months they spent on the island were fully reported in the local press. Chao's lectures at Taiwan University were widely acclaimed. They were later edited and published in book form in 1960 as Yü-yen wen t'i [problems in linguistics]. This was the first book on general linguistic theory to be written in Chinese. After leaving Taiwan, Chao visited Japan, where he lectured at Kyoto University on the phonetics and grammar of the Chinese language. After the Second World War, Chao's professional papers were devoted to general discussions of the Chinese language, methods for investigating Chinese dialects, and other aspects of the relationships of language, thought, and logic. He continued to carry out some research on Chinese dialects, notably the Toishan (T'aishan) dialect spoken by most of the overseas Chinese from Kwangtung who emigrated to the United States. In accordance with his earlier methods, Chao's study of the Toishan dialect emphasized the phonetic description of phrases and word groups. In 1962, on the occasion of the death of Hu Shih, his friend of 50 years, Chao wrote an essay on Hu's native dialect, that of the Chi-hsi district of southeastern Anhwei province. After the early 1950's, however, Y. R. Chao's principal work was the preparation of a basic study of the grammar of the standard Chinese language. The development of Chinese language study in the United States in recent years has emphasized the need for a systematic, theoretical explanation of the structure of the colloquial language. From the standpoint of the development of Chinese linguistics, a detailed analysis of the sentence structure of the modern Chinese language would provide a new, and much needed, base for future research on the sentence structure of dialects and of the archaic language. In the general field of scientific linguistics, Chao's work is the first attempt to apply advanced theories and methodology to the study of Chinese. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese was issued in preliminary form by the University of California Press in 1965. Since 1947, Y. R. Chao and his ebullient wife have played a distinctive personal role in the important community of Chinese scholars centered in the Berkeley area.

In 1961, during a ceremony held by the institute of history and philology of Academia Sinica in Taipei to mark the publication of a commemorative volume of essays in honor of Y. R. Chao's sixty-fifth birthday, Li Chi (q.v.), director of the institute and an old friend of the Chao family, paid tribute to the couple on their fortieth wedding anniversary. In good Chinese fashion, Li Chi compared Y. R. Chao's pursuit of learning to that of the seventh-century Buddhist pilgrim, Hsuan-chuang (Hsuan-tsang), who made the arduous trip from China to India by way of Central Asia, recorded in his famous Hsi-yü chi {Record of the Western Regions). "The success of Hsuan-chuang," he stated, "was due largely to assistance and protection from his Bodhisattva. And Mrs. Chao is Chao Yuen-ren's Bodhisattva." Her Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, written originally in Chinese, was translated into English by Y. R. Chao and published in the United States in 1947. She also wrote How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.