Tsinghua's four major mentors of that year, Liang Qichao, Wang Guowei, Chen Yinke, and Zhao Yuanren (1892-1982), all of them can be said to be big and thoughtful, which is not comparable to ordinary people. Zhao Yuanren's specialty is linguistics, just talking about the talent and learning in this field, we can only sigh with hope: he listens extremely keenly, the ability to learn words is extraordinary, proficient in several foreign languages do not speak it, I don't know how many kinds of various dialects in the country, each department of the main dialect family can speak at least one, in 1919 the mainland for the first time formulated the official Chinese pronunciation standard, by the young Zhao Yuanren poured the record, to implement in schools across the country; I have also received a Ph.D. in philosophy, taught physics at Cornell University, taught mathematics at Tsinghua University, wrote many papers on music theory, and composed many tunes, including the extremely popular "How I Don't Want Him".
Zhao Yuanren's most outstanding contribution to linguistics is, I think, the study of the Chinese language, and I think it is the deepest, most authoritative and most interesting in the study of modern Chinese. This is very rare, because, according to my personal bias, there are probably only a few masters in the field of Chinese studies since the New Culture, such as Wang Li, Lu Shuxiang, and Zhu Dexi. Zhao Yuanren can be said to be their senior, and his achievements are still above his students.
From the age of 18, Zhao Yuanren spent more time abroad than at home, and after 1938 he completely emigrated overseas, so most of his writings were written in English, and the majority of readers in China could only read them through translation. As far as I know, Zhao Yuanren's three literary works have been compiled in China, and one of his major works, "Grammar of Spoken Chinese", translated by Lu Shuxiang under the title "Spoken Chinese Grammar", was published by Commerce in 1979. The same book, newly translated by Ding Bang, was published in Hong Kong in 1980 in Chinese and has been reprinted several times. I have never read a better study of Chinese grammar, but many of the results in this book have not been well absorbed by a large number of similar studies in China in the following 20 years, but have been published in batches of similar studies with much lower quality. In addition, Yuan Yulin of Tsinghua University compiled a collection entitled The Exploration and Development of Modern Chinese Linguistics, which was published by Tsinghua University Press in 1992. This book is one of the Tsinghua anthologies, most of which are intended to reflect Zhao Yuanren's academic achievements more comprehensively, and is divided into four parts, theoretical discussion, general introduction of the Chinese language, dialect research, and grammatical analysis, each part contains four papers, and there are two important appendices of "Life Memorabilia" and "Zhao Yuanren's Linguistic Treatises". The other is The Language Problem, which was printed once in 1980 and again in 1997. This is a series of lectures in Taiwan in 1959, which is most suitable for ordinary readers, but the number of prints at a time is only 2,000, I don't know why.
Zhao Yuanren's linguistic works have many advantages. His knowledge penetrates ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literature and science, and at the same time, he actually masters so many languages and dialects, and has done a lot of field phonetic investigations, so on the one hand, he has a broad idea, and on the other hand, he is subtle and credible. Another characteristic is the thoroughness and rigor of theoretical concepts, which is rarely seen in Chinese scholars. We know that many textbooks use the phrase "can be independent and meaningful" to define "words", and Zhao Yuanren objected, "because when you talk about meaning, that is, all things in the universe are included" (page 50, the quotations are all from "The Problem of Language"), the words are lighthearted, but if you think about this issue carefully, you will know that he said it clearly and strictly. This is exactly the opposite of most of the textbooks we use now, and when we open a book, we define "words" as follows: "Words are units of language and building materials with simple meanings, independent phonetic forms, complete and fixed sounds, and there are no pauses in them".
Zhao Yuanren's book belongs to the kind of books that Bacon said cannot be summarized and must be read in their entirety, and even the examples he gives give give people knowledge or enhance interest, for example, he talks about phonetic changes, for example, that the "ding" and "covenant" in "covenant" and "contract" are two words, with different origins and different readings in some dialects, and then cites the "easy" of "easy" and the "easy" of "change", indicating that they were originally two words, one read to sound and the other to read into sound (p. 114). Speaking of jagged borrowings, he cites the example of "authority", which originally only meant "authority", but was used to translate authority, which in turn means "expert", so the Chinese word "authority" also has this escape (p. 137). Zhao Yuanren "returned to the covenant from Bo" (his student Wang Li's praise), and his theory is often like talking about family life, which seems to be an idle pen, but it may involve very esoteric theoretical arguments. We have always heard that Western characters are phonetic, and Chinese characters are ideographic, but Zhao Yuanren pointed out that "Chinese characters are also written language." It's just that it doesn't write phonemes, but larger morphemes" (p. 228), "foreign characters are also pronounced, and Chinese characters are also phoneticized" (p. 146), and it is said that an old man holds a letter from home and reads words in his mouth, so that he can bite out the meaning of the text. For example, when it comes to the difference between United Kingdom English and United States English, many people think that parents are always more traditional and authentic than their children, so it must be the United States who rose later to change the way English is read, but Zhao Yuanren tells us that in fact, Americans have preserved the ancient pronunciation (page 161), just like many Chinese customs and habits are preserved in overseas Chinese, and the local residents have changed fashionably several times.
Zhao Yuanren's books should be read by anyone who is interested in linguistic phenomena, and they will always get things that they can't usually think of in other books. People like me who are a little interested in the philosophy of language should read it, we talk about the philosophy of language, and a lot of common sense involving language phenomena is often not understood, and we take it for granted to make some wrong generalizations, and then lead to more marginal conclusions, a bit like Zhao Tingyang's sentence written under one of his cartoons: higher, more mysterious, more absurd. Two days ago, a thinker explained to me the peculiar course of Chinese history based on the fact that the morphemes in Chinese are basically monosyllabic, and if he had known that many of the non-kinship language groups in the Pacific had monosyllabic morphemes (p. 64), his description of Chinese history might have become a little lower and a little more reliable.
Text/Chen Jiaying