His wife, Buwei Yang Chao, authored a book on Chinese cuisine called How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, an Asia Press book from the John Day Company, which had its fifth edition in 1945. Yuen Ren Chao offers his insights liberally throughout the book, and making intriguing glimpses into the kind of relationship they had together.
He is also famous for authoring the essay the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den, which is often used as an argument against Romanization of Chinese. The essay consists of 92 characters all with the sound shi (though in the four different tones of Mandarin), and is incomprehensible when romanized.
However, Chao continues to say that tones, though also being suprasegmental phonemes, must be treated as segmental phonemes, because in tonal languages they are lexical, that is, altering tone usually changes the meaning, whereas other prosodic features, such as stress and intonation, are not lexical, at least not that much:
As Chao says, the phonemes occur one after another in temporal succession, and the tones are not part of it.
In his A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968a), Ruen RenChao defines polysyllabic words and compounds in the Chinese language, and renders the examples with both hanzi and GR writing.
YuenRenChao (Traditional Chinese: 趙元任; Pinyin: Zhào Yuánrèn; WG: Chao Yüan-jen; Gwoyeu Romatzyh: Jaw Yuanrenn) (November 3, 1892 - February 25, 1982) was a Chinese linguist and amateur composer who shaped Gwoyeu Romatzyh and the scientific studies, especially the phonology, of the Chinese language.
Feeds |
Contact