Liu Bannong
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Liu Bannong (Chinese: 劉半農) or Liu Fu (劉復) (1891 - 1934) was a Chinese linguist and poet.
A native of Jiangsu, he was an important contributor to the influential magazine La Jeunesse during the May Fourth Movement. He began to write poetry in vernacular Chinese in 1917, and was credited to have coined the Chinese feminine pronoun ta (她), which he used in his poems. The usage was popularised by the song Jiao Wo Ruhe Bu Xiang Ta (教我如何不想她 "How could I help thinking of her"), a "pop hit" in the 1930s in China, with the lyric written by him and the melody by Yuen Ren Chao.
In 1920, he left China for studying linguistics aboard, first London, then Paris. He gained his PhD at the University of Paris, with his experiments done on the Chinese tones. During his stint in Paris, he compiled Dunhuang Duosuo (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in the Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work of "Dunhuang Studies".
He returned to China in 1925, and began to teach in colleges. He collaborated with Li Jiarui (李家瑞) to compile Songyuan Yilai Suzi Pu (宋元以來俗字譜 "The vernacular characters used from the Song and Yuan dynasties onwards"). Published in 1930, it was a key work to the standardisation of simplified Chinese characters. He died of a sudden illness after a trip of linguistic fieldwork, at the age of 44. Lu Xun wrote a short memoir about Liu (憶劉半農君) after his death.
[edit] External links
- (Chinese) Yang Jianmin (杨建民), "The story of Liu Bannong and she" (刘半农与"她"的故事)
