Li Fanggui

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Li Fang-Kuei (Chinese: 李方桂; pinyin: Lǐ Fāngguì; Wade-Giles: Li Fang-Kuei, Fang-Kuei Li) (20 August 1902-21 August 1987) was a Chinese American linguist.

Li was one of the first Chinese to study linguistics outside of China. Originally a student of medicine, he switched to linguistics when he went to the United States in 1924. He gained a BA in linguistics at the University of Michigan two years later. Then he went on studying under Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield at the University of Chicago. In the US, he conducted field studies of the languages of the American Indians. His first exposure to fieldwork was his study of the Mattole language in northern California. In 1928 he received his PhD at the University of Chicago, with his thesis Mattole: An Athabaskan Language published in 1930.

In 1929 he returned to China and, along with Yuen Ren Chao and Luo Changpei, became a researcher at the Institute of History and Philology (歷史語言研究所) of the Academia Sinica (then located at Beijing, i.e. the now Chinese Academy of Sciences). 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 Old Chinese and Tibetan.

Later, Li returned to the US and taught Chinese language and linguistics at Yale in 1938-39, and after World War II at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1949 to 1969, and then at the University of Hawaii. In 1977 he published a comparison of Tai languages, the crystallization of more than forty years of research.

Li died in San Mateo County, California. The Tsinghua University, his alma mater, began to publish his complete works in 2005 .

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