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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California China Scholars Series Yuen Ren Chao CHINESE LINGUIST, PHONOLOGIST, COMPOSER, & AUTHOR With an Introduction by Mary Haas An Interview Conducted by Rosemary Levenson Copy No. @ 1977 by The Regents of the University of California All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Yuen Ren Chao dated 8,August 1974. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Yuen Ren Chao requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond. TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Yuen Ren Chao INTRODUCTION by Mary Haas INTERVIEW HISTORY iii EARLY YEARS Family Background Early Education Ghosts and Spirits Eclipses, Rites, and Religion Traveling with the Family Fashions Life in Changchm and Soochow "Foreign" School "Youth 's Improvement Society" Sixty Years of Diaries The Boxer Indemnity Fund Scholarship I1 STUDENT YEARS IN AMERICA, 1910-1920 Cornell, 1910-1915, B.A. in Mathematics The Student Science Journal, K'o Hsueh Musical Studies, Finances, and Outings World Events Harvard Years; 1915-1918, a Ph.D. in Philosophy Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, 1918-1919 111 RETURN TO CHINA Students and Universities in the '20s With Bertrand Russell and Dora Black; 1920-1921 Academia Sinica and Harvard Yenching Tsing Hua March 18 Incident, Peking, 1926 IV LANGUAGE REFORM IN CHINA IN THE '20s Unification of the National Language Romanization and Gwoyeu Romatzyh Language Reform and Literature Publishing with the Commercial Press, Shanghai Theater Folklore and Language Reform New Styles in Intellectual Enterprise Y.R. Chao as Composer and Singer V THE DIALECT SURVEYS Purposes of the Surveys Early Recording Instruments: the Kymograph and the Spectrograph Equipment Methods VI WESTERN EXPERIENCE AND TRAVELS IN THE '20s AND '30s Teaching and Studying at Harvard, 1921-1924 Meetings with European Scholars, 1924-1925; Karlgren, Pelliot, Giles, and Others "Funeral Director" of the Tsing Hua Scholarship Students in America Linguistic Studies in America The Shadows of War VII CAREERS IN AMERICA, 1938-1947 A Year at the University of Hawaii, 1938-1939 Teaching Chinese Music: More Thoughts on Composition Yale and the Yale Linguistic Club Harvard and the Dictionary Project U.S. Army Chinese Language School at Harvard Consultant to Bell and General Electric Laboratories: Breaking a Japanese Code UNESCO Work Co-author with Buwei Yang Chao VIII THE BERKELEY YEARS, 1947- A Quick Appointment Berkeley Colleagues: Peter Boodberg, Ferdinand Lessing, Chen Shih-hs iang Growth and Development of the Oriental Languages Department The East Asiatic Library The Loyalty Oath and the Free Speech Movement Further Dialect Studies: Toi Shan in Chinatown Grammar of Spoken Chinese Comments on Modern Linguistics Professional Associations The Faculty Research Lecture 'language at Play and Play at Language" Children and Language Study General Chinese: A New Language Reform Meeting with Chou En-lai, 1973 P'u-t'ung hua and Pinyin Family in China Comments on the Chaos' Trip to China Summings Up APPENDIX A: First "Green Letter", Peking, 1921 -rrwo~'d & cof'7~kt APPENDIX B: "Language at Play, Why. Are. See." January, 1971 APPENDIX C: Bibliography INDEX INTRODUCTION It was a happy circumstance for linguists and other scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, when the situation in China in 1947 made it impossible for Buwei and Y.R. Chao to return to their native land as they had planned. They had pulled up stakes from Harvard and had traveled across the continent with the aim of proceeding to China to stay. But it was not to be. And so it came about that they settled in Berkeley where they remain to this day, thirty years later. From his very earliest years Y.R. Chao had always been keenly aware of and alive to everything in the world about him. His physical surroundings, and his linguistic surroundings all enveloped his consciousness with the thoroughness that became manifest in the future physicist, mathematician, linguist, composer, translator, and world citizen. He was born at a critical time in China's history. It was a time when ' some of the people of this ancient nation were beginning to show a willingness to look toward the West in a way that had been completely impossible only a short time before. Though his early education was in the traditional mold, he was among the very first Chinese to receive his advanced education in America. And so he benefited in a way that few others had done before him from the best of the traditional philosophical Chinese training followed by the best of the modem Western scientific training. The difference between the secure world of family and friends in his early years and the highly individualistic world of his American college years was profound. Though he had intended to stay only four years on that first visit, he actually stayed for ten years. He seemed to be made for this new world. He was stimulated by it in a way he had not been stimulated in China. He wanted to learn everything - about it, not only American science and philosophy but American customs as well. The career of Y.R. Chao is a remarkable one. The breadth of his interests is almost overwhelming. To label him as "mathematician" or "linguist" or "musician" is quite misleading; only "scholar" will do. I know of no other person who participates so readily in both of the two cultures--science and humanism--, each of which had become by the middle of the twentieth century a way of life and thought considered completely foreign to the other. But Chao moves easily and articulately in both. In the course of his long career as a teacher, he has taught physics, mathematics, philosophy, the Chinese language, the history of Chinese music, Chinese grammar, Chinese logic, and theoretical linguistics. He laid the foundations of modern linguistics in China in the 1920's and has been an active participant in a number of major projects, both in China and in America, through the years. In China he and a circle of close associates developed the National Romanization (also known as "Chao Yuen Ren's ~omanization"), a phonetic alphabet especially designed for the Chinese language; it was officially adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. Academia Sinica, Peking,was also established in 1928 and within it the Institute of History and Philology. The linguistic activities of the Institute were placed under his direction in 1929. In this capacity he trained students in the techniques of linguistic field work and conducted and directed surveys of Chinese dialects in several provinces. Later, in America, he joined the Chinese dictionary project of the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard. With the help of Yang Lien-sheng he produced what is still the best dictionary of colloquial Chinese, Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1946). Traditionally, only the literary language was worthy of study and documentation; hence a colloquial dictionary was a highly innovative undertaking. His Berkeley years have been productive ones and he has been the recipient of many honors during those and the immediately preceding years. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954-55 and a Fulbright Research Scholar at Kyoto University in 1959. He served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1945 and of the American Oriental Society in 1960. In 1967, the University of California, Berkeley, granted him its highest honor when he was named Faculty Research Lecturer for that year. Two honorary doctoral degrees have also been conferred upon him, Litt. D., Princeton, 1946, and LL.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1963. It would be quite negligent to close these remarks without some reference to his genius for whimsicality. One of his proudest accomplishments as a translator has been his translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland into Chinese! And one of his most delightful feats on the lecture circuit is to record on tape a poem or passage uttered backwards (complete with reverse intonation) in English. The tape is then reversed and played to his astounded audience to reveal a perfectly natural English pronunciation. The life of such a man is like a work of art. No matter from what angle it is viewed there is always something new to be discerned to serve as a source of wonder, of contemplation, and of inspiration. Mary R. Haas Emeritus Professor of Linguistics June 28, 1977 Department of Linguistics University of California Berkeley, California INTERVIEW HISTORY Professor Yuen Ren Chao was born in 1892; his multifaceted life as an outstanding linguist, phonologist, theorist, and teacher spans the China of the Ch'ing dynasty and the Boxer Rebellion to Mao Tse-tung and ping pong diplomacy. His academic career in America began as an undergraduate at Cornell in 1910 when Taft was president and continues actively in 1977 with a busy regime of writing and publishing which he shares with his wife, Doctor Buwei Yang Chao. The grandson of a magistrate, Mr. Chao's education began in the traditional classical mold at home where he was taught by his grandfather, parents, and tutors.