Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

The superlatives used to describe him are certainly on target. To quote from the guest book at the John DeFrancis Memorial site (h/t Granite Studio).

• towering and generous
• shaped national thinking
• full of freshness

… and so on.

To this, I could only add:

Beijing Sounds is heavily indebted to and inspired by this man whose influence has reached so far. From the ideas in “Fact and Fantasy” to deep research and clear language samples in the ABC Dictionary, the originality and thoroughness of his scholarship inform many of my study hours every week.

To give back to the world a small fraction of what he gave would be a great accomplishment indeed.

Mao Dun had noted that his granddaughter on finishing first grade had mastered Pinyin so well that she was able to correspond with her mother when the latter went to work in the countryside. In the second grade, however, she was given so little practice in Pinyin that she lost the skill, without, of course, achieving literacy in characters. Incensed at an educational policy which permitted literate first-graders to relapse into a state of illiteracy, he called on teachers to help children retain mastery of Pinyin while seeking to add command of the characters. He called this a policy of “walking on two legs”

The Chinese Language — Fact and Fantasy (paperback p.268)

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See Pinyin.info for a chapter of the book.

Other tributes to John DeFrancis:

• Pinyin.info
• Glossographia
• Language Hat
• Andrew Leonard on Salon
• Brendan O’Kane
• David Moser on The China Beat
• Victor Mair on Language Log

Beijing Sounds quotes DeFrancis

• On defining the “Chinese language”
• On the 1890s debate over which regionalect to create a phonetic system for