He made important pioneering contributions to the studies of modern Chinese phonetics, phonology and grammar.

Yi Zuolin was born in 1897 to a scholar family in Nantong, Jiangsu Province of China.

He followed the retreating provincial government and continued to work in areas of northern Jiangsu that had not fallen into enemy hands.

He personally taught the Chinese language class, and he would lead the students every day in their morning exercises.

He succumbed to a terminal disease in 1945 and died in a taxi boat in Rugao on his way from Jiangyan back to Nantong, a few months before the Sino-Japanese war would end.

They referred to him as a “giant man of letters and a renowned master of education”, and they called upon the government to 1.

His mother was Wang Shuyan (王述嚴), a graduate of Tungchou Women Teachers’ College.

Rather than blindly fitting Chinese language materials into linguistic models based on western languages, he would apply principles of western linguistic science while studying these materials and make generalizations based on his observations.

A year later it was designated by the Ministry of Education as a standard reference book for students learning the Mandarin phonetic system in all schools nationwide.

For the first time ever, he created the method of describing tones with a tonal contour “based on the scale of the musical staff”.

With his respectable academic achievements, Yi became a Chinese linguist of the same caliber as Li Jinxi, Yuen Ren Chao, Lin Yutang et al.