Yi Tso-lin

Portrait of Yi Tso-lin ca.1930

Yi Tso-lin (also known as Yi Chien-lou ; born July 19, 1897 in Nantong , China , † March 29, 1945 in Rugao , China), court name Yi Chien-Lou, was a linguist , educator and philanthropist in China. He made important contributions to the study of the phonetics , phonology and grammar of modern Chinese.

Life

He was considered a good student and studied until 1917 at Tungchou Teachers' College, China's first private training school for teachers. He then worked first for a book publisher and then for the Shanghai National Language College (上海 國語 專修 學校). He was appointed by a preparatory committee for an institute to support a uniform Chinese language (國語 統一 籌備 委員會) in 1923, along with ten other nationally known scientists, including Lin Yutang and Yuen Ren Chao, the committee for the conversion of Chinese into Western Assigned languages ​​(國語 羅馬 字母 拼音 研究 委員會). As part of this activity, he published a seminal grammar of the modern Chinese language in 1924 . He then worked as a teacher in primary and secondary schools, and later became a school inspector in Jiangsu Province .

For a large part of his life he endeavored to educate the children of poorer sections of the population, even during the Japanese occupation. He died before the end of World War II.

Works

His most important publications are the 1920 lectures on Chinese phonetics [國 音 學 講義] and the work Four lectures on Chinese grammar [國語 文法 四 講] published in 1924 .