Henry Courtenay Fenn Explained

Henry Courtenay Fenn
Birth Date:	February 26, 1894
Other Names:	H. C. Fenn
Nationality:	American
Occupation:	sinologist
Known For:	architect of Yale University's Chinese language program
Notable Works:	"Yale system" of Chinese grammar
Father:	Reverend Dr. Courtenay Hughes Fenn
Mother:	Alice Holstein May Fenn

Henry Courtenay Fenn, more commonly known as H. C. Fenn, (February 26, 1894 – July 1978) was an American sinologist and architect of Yale University's Chinese language program.

Life

H. C. Fenn was the son of the Reverend Dr. Courtenay Hughes Fenn, missionary to China and compiler of The Five Thousand Dictionary, and his wife Alice Holstein May Fenn, and grew up in Peking. He married Constance Latimer Sargent on January 27, 1925.

Career

Fenn was active in the "Yale system" of Chinese grammar developed by himself, George Kennedy, Gardner Tewksbury, Wang Fangyu and others working in the Institute of Far Eastern Languages (IFEL) at Yale in the late 1940s. He was director of IFEL from 1952 to 1962. After his mandatory retirement from Yale, he set up a Chinese language department at Dartmouth and spent three years at Washington University in St. Louis.

Selected works

• Songs from Hypnia, Henry C. Fenn, 1915
• A Syllabus of the History of Chinese Civilization and Culture, by L. C. Goodrich and H. C. Fenn, 1929, 1941
• Beginning Chinese, by John De Francis, edited by Henry C. Fenn and George A. Kennedy, 1946
• Chinese characters easily confused, Henry C. Fenn, 1953
• Chinese dialogues, edited by Henry C. Fenn & Pao-che`n Lee, 1953
• Speak Mandarin, by Henry C. Fenn and Gardner M. Tewksbury, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1967
• "Introduction to Chinese Sentence Structure," by Henry C. Fenn, date unknown.

Sources

• Chinese Language and Culture: Remembering Henry C. Fenn, Yale University