Wang Li (; 10 August 19003 May 1986), courtesy name Wang Liaoyi () and birth name Wang Xiangying (), was a Chinese linguist, educator, translator and poet, described as the founder of Chinese linguistics. His work expands a wide range in Chinese linguistics, including phonology, grammar and lexicography, historical linguistics and dialectal studies. He was also the founder of the first Chinese Linguistics Department at Tsinghua University. He brought the western modern linguistic methodologies back to China and strove for the modernization and reformation of Chinese grammar throughout his whole life. His most famous books include Zhongguo Yinyunxue 中国音韵学 (Chinese Phonology), Zhongguo Wenfa Chutan 中国文法初探 (An Exploratory Study of Chinese Grammar), and Wang Li Guhanyu Zidian 王力古汉语字典 (Wang Li's Character Dictionary of Ancient Chinese).
Early life
Early education Wang Li was born to a poor family in Bobai County, Guangxi, China. He first discovered his interest in literature and novels at the age of seven, inspired by one of the four Great Classical Chinese novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, after he graduated from primary school at the age of 14, his family could no longer support his education. As a result, Wang started to educate himself by reading a large number of books. At the age of seventeen, Wang Li also began to tutor his little brother Xiangrui while the family stilled struggled under poverty and could not provide the money for Xiangrui to go to primary school. Wang Li's talent as a tutor brought him several other young children from the county to study with him. Gradually, Wang built a private school at his house. Wang did not adopt the general teaching style employed by other private schools at the time, which emphasized memorization of text over comprehension. Instead, Wang provided explicit explanation of each text by thoroughly analyzing the syntactic and semantic components of the texts. At the age of 21, Wang was invited to one of his students' house for dinner. He accidentally found fourteen boxes of books, ranging from history to astronomy to medicine, accompanied by the authors' footnotes and literature reviews of various works. Wang asked the host of the family whether he could borrow them and the host kindly lent them to him. Later in his life, Wang considered the discovery of the fourteen boxes of books one turning point of his life.
In the same year, Wang was hired by a local school to teach primary school students Chinese. Three years later, he was funded by his colleagues and the Principal of the school to further pursue his studies in Shanghai.
University In 1924, Wang enrolled at Shanghai Southern University and subsequently at the University of China. Two years later, he was admitted to the Academy of Chinese Learning at Tsinghua University, where he studied with Yuen Ren Chao, Liang Qichao and Wang Guowei, whose instruction and guidance immensely inspired and influenced Wang in the study of linguistics. Among the thirty-two students that entered Tsinghua University in the same year as Wang, he was the only one that chose to study linguistics with Chao. Wang said that "While Liang encourages innovation, Chao emphasizes practicality, both of which are indispensable to the study of linguistics". Wang wrote in the postscript of his paper on the topic of the grammar of Classical Chinese that two specific sentence structures Fanzhao Sentence () and Gangmu Sentence () are only commonly observed in Chinese and are very rare in western linguistics. Fanzhao Sentence () occurs when an object or objective phrase is placed at the beginning of the sentence and is replaced by a pronoun later in the sentence. Gangmu Sentence () is similar to modern English topicalization. After reading the paper, Chao suggested that Wang delete the postscript, claiming that he could not assert the grammatical rules of a language before fully acquiring it. Afterwards, Chao's words "It is easier to claim the presence but harder to claim the absence of things" became the motto of Wang's academic career throughout his whole life.
In 1926, under the advice of Chao, Wang went to Paris to further pursue his study of linguistics. He hoped to learn from the western linguistic theories and bring them back to China. Wang supplemented his education by translating French literature into Chinese, and his works were greatly recognized and praised by the editor of the Commercial Press, Ye Shengtao. Ye spoke highly of Wang's translation, commenting that "I cannot comment on faithfulness (to the original work) and expressiveness, but there is no doubt that his translation is filled with elegance and taste."
Early career Five years later, Wang finished his education in France with a doctorate degree in the study of Bobai phonology. He first focused on dialects in Liangguang region, which includes Guangdong and Guangxi in Southern China.Hutchings, Graham (2003). "Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region". Modern China: A Guide to a Century of Change. Harvard University Press. p. 173. Based on his observation and intuition as a first language speaker of the Bobai dialect, Wang presumed that cuōkǒu (撮口, "round mouth"), one of the four traditional ways of classifying syllable finals of Mandarin dialects, does not exist in Liangguang area, as it does not exist in the Bobai dialect.Pulleyblank, Edwin. G (1999). "Traditional Chinese Phonology" (PDF). Asia Major. 12 (2): 101–137: 128–129. However, Chao pointed out in his letters to Wang that it was wrong for him to overgeneralize the dialectal patterns in a large area with multiple dialects solely based on the linguistic behaviors of one single dialect. Taking Chao's advice, Wang narrowed his research down to the study of the dialect in Bobai county.
Afterwards, Wang went back to China in 1931 and started teaching at Tsinghua University in Beijing, ranked among the top three academic institutions in China. In his spare time, he produced various works of literature including books about Greek and Roman literature and translations of Émile Zola's Nana, Molière's plays and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.Chan, Leo Tak-hung (2004). Twentieth-century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. p. 147. While Wang taught General Linguistics and Chinese Phonology for two years at Tsinghua University, his several dozen translations of various works became one of the reasons why he was not offered the expected professorship after two years' teaching. In order to compensate for the unbalanced attention he gave to his job at the university, Wang immersed himself in the study of linguistics and wrote An Exploratory Study of Chinese Grammar (), which earned him the professorship after four years' lecturing at Tsinghua University. In the book, Wang underlines the importance of using the comparative methodologies used in historical linguistics to compare the feature of Chinese and western languages, to build an independent system of Chinese grammar. He considered this work as a "manifesto" that directed his later works and research in Chinese linguistics.
Second Sino-Japanese War During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Wang supported himself through a great number of publications, including newspaper columns and essays on a variety of subjects and genres. The hardship of the war did not stop his research in linguistics. By the end of the war, Wang's research had expanded to phonology, morphology, syntax, poetry and dialectal studies, and he began to plan for the future of Chinese linguistics. He said, "as the language of Chinese starts to prosper, Chinese may appear as one of the foreign languages, parallel to English, French, German and Italian in universities across the world. By the time it happens, is there a Chinese dictionary as good as the Oxford Dictionary, or a formal Chinese grammar system as advanced as the Essentials of English Grammar of Jespersen?"
During the war, Wang also wrote a book called 龙虫并雕斋琐语 (Trivial Talk of Dragon and Worm Carving), a collection of prose and essays he wrote in Kunming, Southern China. In traditional Chinese craftwork, the technique of carving the worm is elementary and uncomplicated, while carving of the dragon requires meticulousness and precision. Wang metaphorically used the phrase "carve the worm" to refer to the stories he wrote about common life, including personal anecdotes and his ruminations, parallel to his other eminent and well-known "carve the dragon" works. This collection of essays is less academically rigid but profound and reflective, which deeply influenced the people during the hardship of wartime. Wang's anecdotes and essays were once criticized by Wen Yiduo, a famous Chinese poet, for their vulgarity and bad taste, which in Wang's opinion were a genuine reflection of people's lives. In one of Wang's essays, Salaries, he pointed out that the word salaries "薪(firewood)水(water)" originally refers to money to buy firewood and water—money needed for sustenance. However, Wang derided the miserly pay for labor from the Chinese government by saying that with salaries being so low, 薪水 should be renamed 茶(tea)水(water) or 风(wind)水(water), as the only thing people could buy with the scarce amount of money was tea or wind. Such stories resonated with those who suffered during wartime and those who worked and lived at the bottom of society.
Later life
Later career After the war, Wang started to teach at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong in 1946 and founded the first Linguistics Department among Chinese universities. Wang himself designed the course syllabi and content for most of the courses. He integrated his research into teaching and used his own research as teaching materials. He believed that "students should not be taught through books bought by the teacher but through books written by the teacher". Many of his research works and notes were used as the textbooks and were directly sent to be published right after the courses ended.
As the aftermath of the war drifted away, the Chinese government began to switch its prioritization from war efforts into developing literacy rates, implemented through a series of policy in language reform. By the time the State Commission on Language Reform was founded (1954), the number of students in the Linguistics Department increased rapidly and the department was merged into the Chinese Department at Peking University in Beijing, China. By then, Wang served as the department chair of the Department of Chinese Language Studies at Peking University, and was also a member of the advisory board of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and State Commission on Language Reform. He was actively engaged in the institution and transmission of pinyin (the romanization system of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation) and putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin). Wang insisted that pinyin should be represented in the form of Latin alphabet, and Pinyin should be taught to students in the first year of school.