Li Fang-Kuei
Chinese linguist and sinologist (1902–1987)
Li Fang-Kuei (Chinese: 李方桂; pinyin: Lǐ Fāngguì; 20 August 1902 – 21 August 1987) was a Chinese-American linguist known for his studies of the varieties of Chinese, his reconstructions of Old Chinese and Proto-Tai, and his documentation of 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 University of Michigan in 1926 after only two years of study. He then did graduate study under Edward Sapir at the University of Chicago, where he was Sapir's first graduate student. From Sapir he learned phonetics, field methods, and American Indian languages. Sapir also encouraged him to study East and Southeast Asian languages, leading to his work on Thai and Sino-Tibetan. Li was also a student of Leonard Bloomfield at this time, from whom Li learned Germanic linguistics and textual analysis.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q610562. VIAF identifies the subject as 238942041. The Library of Congress control number is n81108590. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1987, 1880 and 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Li Fang-Kuei” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.