The book of the day is actually not shown here, but only the accompanying records. Legendary Chinese-American linguist Yuen Ren Chao (Zhao Yuanren 趙元任, 1892-1982) published his Mandarin Primer 國語入門 in 1948, and it became a classic for teaching basic modern Chinese. Yuen Ren Chao was awarded a Boxer indemnity scholarship 庚子賠款獎學金 in 1910 and studied mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where he learnt to know Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962), a leader in the New Culture and May 4th Movements, later president of Peking University and Chinese ambassador to the USA.
Yuen Ren Chao’s doctoral degree from Harvard in 1918, however, was in philosophy. Only when Chao returned to China in 1920 did he take a systematic interest in linguistics, and did research on dialects at Academia Sinica. In the 1930s Chao together with another well-known linguist, Luo Changpei 羅常培 (1899–1958), translated Bernhard Karlgren’s Études sur la Phonologie Chinoise into Chinese, published in 1940 as 《中國音韻學研究》.
Our records are the original 1955 edition, and you may listen to the recordings online. The voices heard are Yuen Ren Chao himself and his daughter Rulan Chao Pian (卞趙如蘭 Bian Zhao Rulan, 1922–2013). She was a prominent ethnomusicologist and professor at Harvard University. She and Chao Yuen Ren assisted Buwei Yang Chao (趙楊步偉 1889–1981), Chao’s wife and Rulan’s mother who was a physician, in writing How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, a celebrated cookbook where they together coined English terms as ”stir fry” 炒 and ”pot stickers” 鍋貼 for Chinese cooking methods and dishes.