Li Fang-Kuei

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In this Chinese name, the family name is Li.
Li Fang-Kuei
Republic of China
  • United States[citation needed]
    • Academic background
    Education
    ThesisMattole: An Athabaskan Language (1928)
    Doctoral advisorEdward Sapir
    Academic work
    DisciplineLinguistics
    Institutions
    Notable students
    Chinese name
    Hanyu Pinyin
    		Lǐ Fāngguì
    Gwoyeu RomatzyhLii Fangguey
    Wade–GilesLi3 Fang1-kuei4
    IPA[lì fáŋkwêɪ]
    Yue: Cantonese
    Yale RomanizationLéih Fōng-gwai
    JyutpingLei5 Fong1-gwai3

    Li Fang-Kuei (

    Dene
    languages in North America.

    Biography

    Li Fang-Kuei was born on 20 August 1902 in Guangzhou during the final years of the Qing dynasty to a minor scholarly family from Xiyang, a small town in Shanxi roughly 50 kilometers (31 mi) south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu (李光宇) received his imperial examination degree in 1880, and served in minor official posts in the late 19th to early 20th century.

    Li was one of the first Chinese people to study linguistics outside China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He earned a BA in linguistics at the

    Indo-European linguistics, especially Greek and Latin, from Carl Darling Buck at Chicago, and in 1928 Buck secured a 6-month fellowship at Harvard University for him, where he studied Sanskrit and Tibetan.[1]

    Li conducted field studies of the indigenous languages of the Americas. His first exposure to fieldwork was his study of the

    Hare language.[1]

    After his fieldwork on Hare, in 1929 he returned to China and, along with

    Wuming dialects spoken by the Zhuang people, while at the same time conducting deep investigations into Old Chinese and Tibetan. Li's revisions of Bernhard Karlgren's reconstructions of Middle Chinese
    and Old Chinese were widely used by students of ancient Chinese from their publication in the 1970s until the late 1990s.

    Li taught Chinese language and linguistics at Yale University from 1938 to 1939, and after World War II taught at Harvard University from 1946 to 1948. During the same period he was working on a dictionary at the Harvard–Yenching Institute, followed by another year teaching at Yale from 1948 to 1949, where his students included Nicholas Bodman.[2] In 1949, he became professor of Chinese at the University of Washington, where he taught from 1949 to 1969, after which he taught at the University of Hawaiʻi until his retirement in 1974. In 1977, he published a comparative reconstruction of Tai languages, the result of more than forty years of research. He also worked at Academia Sinica, now in Taiwan, in 1973.

    Li died in

    California State University, Hayward and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as their son Peter Li and daughter Annie Li. His alma mater Tsinghua University
    began to publish his complete works in 2005.

    Selected works

    See also

    References

    1. ^ a b "Linguistics east and west: American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai, Fang-kuei Li". oac.cdlib.org. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
    2. ^ "Linguistics east and west: American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai, Fang-kuei Li". oac.cdlib.org. Retrieved 26 March 2022.

    Further reading

    • (in Chinese) Mah Feng-hua 馬逢華 (1988), "Daonian Li Fanggui xiansheng" 悼念李方桂先生 ("Remembering Mr. Li Fang-kuei"), in Zhuanji wenxue 25.2: 110–114.
    • (in Chinese) Xu Ying 徐櫻 (1994). Fanggui yu wo wushiwu nian 方桂與我五十五年 (Fang-kuei's Fifty-five Years with Me) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan).

    External links

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