Famous Chinese Shopping City Books

Li Fanggui Wikipedia

Li Fanggui (?????????, pinyin: L?? F??nggu??; Wade-Giles: Li Fang-Kuei, Fang-Kuei Li) (1902-1987), Chinese American linguist.

Li was one of the first Chinese race|Chinese to study linguistics outside of China. He came to the United States to study in 1924, under the direction of Edward Sapir. There he conducted field studies of the languages of the Indigenous languages of the Americas|American Indians. In 1928 he became a professor at the University of Chicago, with his thesis Mattole: An Athabaskan Language published in 1930. In 1929 he returned to China and became a researcher at the Academia Sinica Department of Historical Linguistics. From this point on, he performed field studies of several Tai languages (including the Zhuang people's Longzhou and Wuming dialects), while at the same time conducting deep investigations into ancient Chinese and Tibetan language|Tibetan.

Later, Li returned to the United States and taught Chinese language and linguistics at the University of Washington from 1949 to 1969, and then at the University of Hawaii.

In 1977 he published a comparison of Tai languages, the crystalization of more than forty years of research.

Li's first exposure to fieldwork was his study of the Mattole language in northern California.

Last Modified:   2005-11-07