Li Fang-Kuei


Li Fang-Kuei was a Chinese linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, and for his reconstructions of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai.

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 south of Yangquan. Li's father Li Guangyu received his jinshi 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 gained a B.A. in linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1926 after only two years of study. He then did graduate study under Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield at the University of Chicago. Li conducted field studies of American Indian languages. His first exposure to fieldwork was his study of the Mattole language of northern California. He received an M.A. in 1927 and a Ph.D. in 1928, and his dissertation Mattole: An Athabaskan Language was published in 1930.
In 1929 he returned to China and, along with Y.R. Chao and Luo Changpei, became a researcher at the Institute of Historical Linguistics of the Academia Sinica. From this point on, he performed field studies of several Tai languages, 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 briefly taught Chinese language and linguistics at Yale University in 1938–39, and after World War II was professor of Chinese at the University of Washington from 1949 to 1969, and then at the University of Hawaii until his retirement. In 1977 he published a comparison 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 San Mateo County, California, survived by his wife Xu Ying and their daughter Lindy Li Mark, a professor of anthropology who taught at California State University, Hayward and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as their son Peter Li and daughter Annie Li.
Tsinghua University, his alma mater, began to publish his complete works in 2005.

Selected works