Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

China Scholars Series

Fang-Kuei Li
LINGUISTICS EAST AND WEST: AMERICAN INDIAN, SINO-TIBETAN, AND THAI

With an Introduction by
George Taylor

Interviews Conducted by
N ing- Ping Chan

and

Randy LaPolla
in 1986

Copyright (c) 1988 by The Regents of the University of California

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing
leading participants in or well -placed witnesses to major events in the
development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral
history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an
informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is
transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by
the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form,
indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and other
research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee
in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan,
deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

********************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal
agreement between the University of California and
Fang-Kuei Li dated 20 September 1986. The manuscript
is thereby made available for research purposes. All
literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to
publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the
University of California, Berkeley. No part of the
manuscript may be quoted for publication without the
written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley.

Request for permission to quote for publication should
be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486
Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and
should include identification of the specific passages to be
quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification
of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as
follows :

Fang-Kuei Li, "Linguistics East and West:
American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai,"
an oral history conducted 1986 by Ning-Ping
Chan and Randy LaPolla, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1988.

Copy no .

FANG-KUEI LI
December, 1971

DONORS TO THE FANG-KUEI LI ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Peter Li, Ph.D.

Mrs . Nancy Hsu

Alex K. Hsu

Lindy Li Mark, Ph.D.

Mrs. Hsu Ying Li

Nanqian Li

Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Chan

Mrs . Shu Feng Hsu

Henry and Barbara Noel

Mrs. Lily S.J. Sun Wong

TABLE OF CONTENTS Fang-Kuei Li

INTRODUCTION by George Taylor i

IN MEMORIAM iv

INTERVIEW HISTORY

Editor Malca Chall v

Interviewers Ning-Ping Chan vii

Randy LaPolla ix

I CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION IN CHINA
Education in Beijing, 1912-1924
Decision to Study Linguistics

II UNIVERSITY AND RELATED EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND
EUROPE, 1924-1929

The University of Michigan, 1924-1926

The University of Chicago, 1926-1928 8

Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir: Teaching Methods

Compared

Field Work on Indian Languages in California, 1927 13

The Hoopa Indians 14

The Mattole Indians

The Wailaki Indians 18

Bloomfield, Sapir, Boas, and Others: Field Work
Methods Compared

Franz Boas

Completing the Dissertation and Exams for the Ph.D.
To Harvard University for Six Months, 1928

The Trip to Europe for Three Months, 1929 23

Field Trip to Study the Hare Indians, Canada, 1928 25

III RESEARCH IN CHINA AND TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS IN THE
UNITED STATES, 1929-1972
Return to China, 1929

Appointment as Research Fellow in the Academia Sinica 30

Research on Hainan Island, 1930
Decision to Study Thai, 1930

Trip to Thailand to Learn the Thai Language, 1933-1934
Research on Guangxi Tai Dialects.^ 1934 34

Translating Bernhard Karlgren's Etudes Sur la Phonologie

Chinoise

Teaching at Yale University, 1937-1939

Return to China; Research and Teaching, 1939-1946 39

Teaching at Harvard University, 1946-1948, and

Yale University, 1948-1949 39

The University of Washington, 1949-1969 40

The University of Honolulu, 1969-1977 41

IV RECOLLECTIONS OF MANY LINGUISTS IN CHINA AND THE WEST 42
Origins and Nature of the Academia Sinica and Some of its

Leading Scholars 42

Cai Yuanpei 42

Hu Shi 44

Yuen-Ren Chao 46

Fu Sinian 49

Ding Shengshu 50

Zhou Zumo 51

Chang Kun 51

Wang Li 56

Qian Mu 57

Fu Maoj i 61

Ma Xueliang 63

Chou Fa-kao 64

Other Linguists Recalled 64

William Gedney 64

Jerry Norman 65
James Matisoff and Paul Benedict: A Critique of the

Methodology 66

Li Rengui 71

Zhang Xianbao 72

Mary Haas 73

V DISCUSSION OF GUIDING PRINCIPLES AND METHODOLOGY FOR

HISTORICAL COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS 75

The Comparative Method 75

Methodology 80

Systems of Rules 86
Professor Li Analyzes His Methods and His Contributions to

Linguistics 89

Loan Words 92

Analyzing Bernhard Karlgren's Work 93

On the Nature of Ancient and Archaic Chinese 95

On Consonant Clusters in Archaic Chinese 97

On the Reconstruction of Proto-Dialects 98

On Dialect Work and the Tai-Yue/Min Connection 99

VI OVERVIEW OF PROFESSOR LI 1 S FAMILY AND CAREER 101

The Family 101

Honorary Degrees 106

Hobbies 107

INTERVIEW DATES HI

APPENDIX

The Li Family's Letter to Friends 113

Curriculum Vitae 115

Bibliography 116

Introduction to TWo Books Written by Mrs. Hsu Ying Li 123

Return to China, 1978, by Lindy Li Mark 124

Return to China, 1983, by Lindy Li Mark 128

Colleagues in China Honor the Memory of Fang-Kuei Li 138

INDEX I 42

INTRODUCTION by George Taylor

Oral history was invented to add a human dimension to the memory of men
and women of outstanding achievement and character. When it is well done,
as this one is, it brings to life, for those who had no personal contact
with Dr. Li, a man known only through books, articles, and reputation.
With the help of oral history we can learn about his motivations, his view
of the field of study, of his colleagues, of the persons who inspired him,
of his hopes and fears (if you read between the lines), of his failures and
achievements, of his stature as a human being. Not that an oral history is
an essay in depth analysis. It is not. But for those who lacked personal
knowledge of this man over a long period of time an oral history provides
the missing dimension; it is a key to the understanding of his formal
written legacy.

We knew Fang-Kuei at the University of Washington for twenty years, the
longest he stayed at any job anywhere. He joined us right after the war at
a crucial time in the history of the University of Washington and for that
matter, of many other schools. We had just begun the task of introducing
into the American university curriculum the study of the non-Western world.
Other universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Berkeley undertook
the same task, each one in its own specific way. But each one found it
necessary to set up a kind of task force to get the job done because
changing a curriculum and stimulating new research is about as easy as
moving a graveyard.

The University of Washington established what was known as the Far
Eastern and later the Far Eastern and Russian Institute. The mission of
this task force was to stimulate teaching and research concerning that vast
area which we call the non-Western world, for lack of a positive term. It
includes China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, the Soviet Union, and the Middle
East, India, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. Obviously there had
to be a division of labor, no university could attract the scarce talent to
cover all these societies and no one was rich enough, in any case, to do a
first class job of all this territory.

The University of Washington chose to put its energies into the study
of Eastern Asia, especially China. Japan, Korea, and Mongolia. The Soviet
Union was added very soon because none of the discipline departments was
taking up the task. Their hesitation can be understood because it became
quite clear that the study of a country such as China, for example, required
an interdisciplinary approach. No one discipline could do it alone. We had
to have a combination of language, politics, economics, religion and
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history. The Far
Eastern and Russian Institute came to shelter, succour and direct all these
disciplines for the study of China. It probably took two decades before the
non-Western world was accepted as a necessary and respectable scholarly
activity of the University.

11

The mission would not have succeeded without a combination of several
important elements. There had to be administrative support in order to
overcome inertia and plain obstructionism on the part of some of the
faculty. Only the administration could give us this necessary core of
professorships for the institute. There had to be inter- university
agreement on standards and degrees. Fortunately the Social Science Research
Council under the inspired leadership of Pendleton Herring and the American
Association of Learned Societies under the equally imaginative leadership of
Fred Burkhart rose to the occasion by establishing a Joint Committee on Area
Studies under the chairmanship of Robert Hall of the University of Michigan.
This committee established the pattern for higher degrees that included
foreign area studies. Most important was the agreement that area studies
was not a discipline in itself. To understand and to take part in
interdisciplinary studies a student had to have command of the tools of at
least one discipline. We respected this decision in theory and practice.
The Ph.D. was to be taken in the discipline department. And the political
science professor, for example, who specialized on China, had to be a member
of the political science department as well as of the Far Eastern and
Russian Institute.

Essential to the success of our mission was money for research.
Fortunately the foundations, first Rockefeller, then Carnegie, and finally
Ford, provided funds both to the committees set up by the Learned Societies
and directly to established university programs. The many millions of
dollars poured into the field of area studies the generally accepted
shorthand for study of the non-Western world were of vital importance.
The foundations provided professorships and student support in a field which
was barren of university funds for such luxuries. The provided funding for
training of scholars in difficult languages that required more commitment
than most European tongues and in disciplines which were reluctant to assist
in the study of societies that were almost unknown and apparently had an
unpredictable future academically.

All these elements were essential. But most important of all was the
human factor. To carry out the mission the director and his close
associates had to find a special kind of professor and student. The student
had to make a long term commitment, especially to language study in a new
field at a time when the future for employment was unclear. It was a risky
undertaking. The professor had to know his subject but he also had to
believe in the mission and accept with patience the long struggle to be
fully accepted by his discipline department and most of all to be willing to
cooperate with other disciplines in research and teaching. Rarest of all,
the professor had to be one who had the ability and motivation to provide
leadership.

We were lucky. In the China field at the University of Washington we
had Professor Franz Michael, a man of extraordinary energy and ability and
driving leadership in interdisciplinary research. It was he who took the
initiative in securing Li Fang-Kuei for our team. Among the initial China
faculty were Hellmut Wilhelm, a Sinologist par excellence who also
understood the social sciences; Vincent Shih. a rare scholar of Chinese
philosophy, Hsiao Kung-Chuan, a distinguished political scientist, Rhoads
Murphy, a geographer. Ma Feng-Hua, an economist, and Karl August Wittfogel.
in economic history.

iii

In other words, Li Fang-Kuei joined our faculty at a monumental time in
American academic history. The motivation to study the non-Western world
was very high because World War II had brought our ignorance of these
societies to our attention and many academics who had been involved in the
war were determined to rectify the situation. One of the most important
contributions that Li made in his whole career was to the development of
area studies at the University of Washington and at the national and even
the international level. He modernized the teaching of the Chinese language
and linguistics. He was able to do this because of his unassailable
scholarship and his capacity for leadership. He was instrumental in
introducing Thai and Tibetan studies.

His hand was as gentle as it was firm. He trained some excellent
graduate students, many of whom have made names for themselves, but he also
paid detailed attention to the teaching of the language at the undergraduate
level. He thoroughly understood and helped to promote the interdisciplinary
approach to the study of Chinese society. He was a good team player who
even helped, on occasion, with administration. From my point of view as
director of the institute, Li Fang-Kuei was a very close associate in a
common task. I knew that I did not have to worry about Chinese language and
linguistics; most important, I knew that they would stay securely in the
institute and not fight for departmental independence. Having all the
disciplines together under one roof was essential to the success of the
institute's mission. Fang-Kuei more than pulled his weight in one of the
great academic revolutions of the post-war period.

Fang-Kuei and his wife, Hsu Ying, were the center of a lively and
gracious social circle. They entertained young and old over the whole range
of the institute. Hsu Ying was the first Chinese woman to offer classes in
Chinese cooking. I had the good fortune to be one of her students and am
now a constant user of the Chinese cookbook she published a few years ago.
The two Li's were the heart of a great family, both domestic and academic.

Dr. Li Fang-Kuei was indeed a very special person and one of the most
outstanding members of the institute faculty in the years when we were
laying the foundations of what is now the Henry Jackson School of
International Studies. The sadness that comes with the loss of a great
human being and a great scholar is matched only be remembering with joy and
satisfaction the privilege of knowing him. What a treasured block of time
it was and what an inner glow we feel just to recall Fang-Kuei 1 s quiet and
massive presence. He was a citizen and scholar of the world, a tower of
strength for international scholarly cooperation, a person of great human
dignity. He will live a long time among those who knew him.

George Taylor

Professor Emeritus

Far Eastern and Russian Institute

University of Washington

21 February 1988
Seattle, Washington

iv

In Meinoriam

FANG-KUEI LI 1902-1987

Professor Emeritus

University of Washington 1969

University of Hawaii, Manoa 1974

F.K. Li, linguist, was born in Canton. His family later
moved to Beijing where his progressive minded not her prepared
him for Qinghua Junior College, then a preparatory school for
students going to study in the U.S. Froa 1924-26 he attended
the University of Michigan, where he became interested in lin
guistics. Later at the University of Chicago, he studied with
Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloonfield, Carl D. Buck, and received
his MA and PhD degrees in 1927 and 1929 respectively.

F.K. Li's linguistic research spans both sides of the
Pacific. In 1927, he caae to California to practice field
methods with Edward Sapir. His research with the last two sur
viving Mattole Indians is the only linguistic record of that
language. Other North American Indian languages he worked on
included Sarcee, Wai laid., Hare, and Eeyak.

Upon returning to China in 1929, F.K. Li applied the
method of historical linguistics to the study of Chinese, and
pioneered descriptive linguistics of non written languages of
ethnic minorities of China. The comparative study of Tai dia
lects in China and in Thailand was one of his many projects.
He also made significant contributions in Sino-Tibetan studies
in his later years.

Back to America again in 1946, F.K. Li taught at Harvard
and Yale, eventually settling at the University of Washington,
Seattle in 1949. In 1969, he accepted an appointment to the
University of Hawaii, which he held until he retired for the
second time in 1974. Honolulu was his home for fifteen years
before moving to Oakland California in 1985. He authored 9
books and scores of articles.

In addition to his academic accomplishments, F.K. Li was
a talented artist, both in Chinese brush painting and Western
watercolor. He played the Chinese flute extremely well and
enjoyed singing and teaching Kunqu, the musical drama of the
Ming dynasty. On July 6, he happily attended the American
debute of the Shanghai Kun Opera in San Francisco. At dawn
on July 7 he suffered a stroke. On August 21, F.K. Li passed
away in the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, Redwood City. Fare
well service was held in Oakland, CA on August 24 by family
and close friends.

Fang-Kuei Li is survived by his wife Hsu Ylng, his three
children Llndy, Peter, Annie, and six grandchildren.

S.F. Chronicle
Monday, September 14, 1987

Fang-Kuei Li

A memorial service is planned
in Beijing, China, for Fang-Kuei Li,
a scholar of American Indian lan
guages, who died in Redwood City
on August 21. He was 85.

Mr. Li, who earned his doctor
ate at the University of Chicago in
1929. taught at Harvard. Yale and
the universities of Washington and
Hawaii, and was emeritus professor
at the two latter schools.

He did linguistic research into
the Sarcee, Waiiaki. Hare and Ee-
yak American Indian languages and
also into dialects in China and Thai
land.

Mr. Li wrote numerous articles
and nine books on his linguistic
studies. He and his wife. Hsu Ying.
moved to Oakland in 1985.

In addition to his wife, he is
survived by two daughters, Lindy
Mark of Oakland and Annie Li of
Seattle, a son. Peter, of Highland
Park. N.J.. and six grandchildren.

A farewell service was held in
Oakland last month. A memorial
service is to be held in Beijing by
the Chinese Academy of Social Sci
ences.

HISTORY OF THE FANG-KUEI LI PROJECT

Over the years, my long-time friend Lindy Li Mark, a professor of
anthropology at California State University, Hay ward, would occasionally
talk to me about an oral history with her father, Fang-Kuei Li, the renowned
linguist. By 1986, the time was right to begin the oral history. The
Regional Oral History Office had completed an oral history with Yuen-Ren
Chao, colleague and friend of Fang-Kuei Li, as part of an on-going China
Scholars Oral History Series; Mr. and Mrs. Li had moved from Hawaii to
Oakland; and most importantly, Professor Li had agreed to participate.

In order to document Professor Li's career as competently as possible,
Willa Baum, the Regional Oral History Office's division head, and Lindy Li
Mark decided that the interviews should be conducted by a linguist
knowlegeable in the Far Eastern languages in which Professor Li had carved
out his reputation. Ning-Ping Chan, a student of Professor Li's and friend
of the family, was asked to serve as interviewer but she soon realized that
her inbred Chinese tradition of deference for an elder of such eminence
limited her asking probing questions. An American student of linguistics was
sought to work with her. Randy LaPolla was selected. Both he and Ning-Ping
have graduate degrees in linguistics with emphasis on Far Eastern languages
and dialects, were well acquainted with Professor Li's publications and his
reputation, and both speak Chinese.

My task was to coordinate the work of the interviewers with the
established process of the Regional Oral History Office. I would oversee
transcription of the interview tapes and assist Ning-Ping and Randy with the
development of interview outlines, editing, and other procedures necessary
to complete the project. Gradually Randy assumed most of the interviewer-
editing tasks and came into the office frequently to turn in the tapes, the
edited transcripts, seek advice, and generally keep me apprised of progress.
On the following pages Ning-Ping and Randy have written oersonal accounts of
their experiences working with Professor Li. Randy's was the basis for the
essay he read at Fang-Kuei Li's memorial service on August 24, 1987.

Approximately twelve interview hours were recorded between July 15, and
December 6, 1986. It took a while for Professor Li and his interviewers to
feel comfortable with the interview process. Professor Li was a modest
person not given to talking about himself, and the interviewers had such awe
and respect for him that they did not at first feel that they could push him
to talk about his extraordinary career. As might be expected of a person
eighty-four years of age who had studied, written, taught, and traveled
extensively for sixty years. Professor Li recalled some aspects of his life
more clearly than others. Mrs. Li, present at all the interview sessions,
helped her husband fill in details. Their conversation was usually in
Chinese. Son, Peter Li, visiting from Rutgers University where he teaches
Asian languages and literature, and daughter Lindy occasionally j oined the
session, adding encouragement and questions. By the time the interviewers
and Professor Li had become comfortable with one another and the
interviewers were ready to assume direction, several of the early
interviews, while replete with fascinating and important information,
contained repetition and overlapping detail. Mrs. Baum, Lindy, Randy, and I

vi

agreed that the oral history would be more useful and readable if the basic
story were available without the repetitions and that anyone wanting the
uncut version could listen to the tapes on deposit in the Microforms
Division of The Bancroft Library.

I assumed responsibility for reorganizing the verbatim transcript
edited previously by Randy. Lindy and I carefully reviewed my ideas before
I made revisions. She had planned to ask her father to fill in some details
but a stroke on July 7, 1987 made his further participation impossible. The
reorganization eliminates repetition but preserves Professor Li's speaking
style and the essentials of his life history.

Next, Randy, Lindy, and Ning-Ping read the retyped manuscript to verify
spelling of proper names, clarify some sentences, and add footnotes. Randy
advised me on some of the intricacies of indexing Chinese linguistics.
Lindy was responsible for the photos, the essays on the Li's trips to China
in 1978 and 1983, the curriculum vitae and bibliography, and for other
material in the text and appendix.

At Lindy's request, Professor Emeritus George Taylor, past director of
the Far Eastern and Russian Institute of the University of Washington, wrote
the insightful introduction which defines Fang-Kuei Li's stature in
linguistics, something which Professor Li was too modest to attempt.

The decisions about the pictures and related materials were made during
informal meetings in the Li's beautiful apartment overlooking Lake Merritt
in Oakland. Filled with Chinese nature paintings, calligraphy, and other
objets d'art of Chinese origin, the home is a comfortable blend of East and
West.

Mrs. Li is one of the most delightful persons I have known. I feel
privileged to have become acquainted (through his oral history) with Fang-
Kuei Li, his culture, his career in linguistics, and his family. It had
never occurred to me when I talked to Lindy about an oral history of her
father that I would have so close a relationship to the project.

We are especially grateful to Professor Li's family and friends for
helping to fund this project. Unfortunately Professor Li died August 21,
1987, so he could not review the transcript nor see the final product of his
efforts. It is hoped that the oral history will offer Fang-Kuei Li's
colleagues, former students, as well as scholars, an account of his life and
career which is largely missing from his eighty-plus published works.

Malca Chall
Senior Editor

23 September 1988

Regional Oral History Office

Berkeley, California

vii

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Ning-Ping Chan

Linguistics East and West; American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai
consists of eight interviews with Professor Fang-Kuei Li. The purpose was
to document Professor Li's account of his distinguished contemporaries and
rich experience in the format of an oral history project. Thre are only
a handful of linguists whose work unqualif iably stands out on its own in the
way that Professor Li's does. Few words are necessary to characterize his
brilliance in linguistic studies. I will just take the opportunity to
state briefly the factors which led to the decision of my involvement in the
project and the degree of my involvement.

My interest in documenting Professor Li's life work had been building
since our earliest encounters. Prior to the summer of 1985, I was a distant
admirer of him. My familiarity with him other than his work was limited to
a few conference lectures and short conversations in some social gatherings.
After I returned from my year at University of Hong Kong in 1985, I had more
time to devote to research projects. That was also the time I learned that
Professor and Mrs. Li had chosen to settle in Oakland. Frequent visits to
his house, often by myself but sometimes with other students of linguistics,
American Indian studies. Thai studies, and Oriental studies, became a source
of intellectual stimulation. He entertained naive questions as well as
questions with profound theoretical consequences. Later he joined the
research staff at the Department of Linguistics on campus. During his guest
lecture at Professor James A. Matisof f's Comparative Li Languages class, he
shared with us a most remarkable venture his early Tai fieldwork in the
Guangxi Province of China, A project to record such experiences as these
was conceived.

Although I was familiar with Professor Yuen-Ren Chao's oral history, the
idea of incorporating family resources in conjunction with the Regional Oral
History Office of The Bancroft Library at U.C, Berkeley came from Dr. Lindy
Li. She made attempts first to obtain funding from the Chinese American
Foundation. She also encouraged me to apply for a grant from the Wang
Institute. I took the initiative to approach the Princeton University-based
Project of Linguistic Analysis which I thought would be more likely to
finance a project of this nature. However, due to the pressure of time, I
was urged to begin the recording sessions.

I did not realize my typical Chinese upbringing would be in the way at
the actual scene of interviews. Soon after a couple of initial sessions, I
began to acknowledge that in the given time frame I could not bring myself
to direct my senior's narrative even when I was doing so without the
slightest tone of challenge or confrontation. Randy J. LaPolla agreed to
collaboration when I solicited his help.

viii

As we prepared for the interviews we set a few goals: We wanted the
people and events which Professor Li would discuss to be integrated with the
social history of the period; we wanted to develop the history of the
Academia Sinica ~ the conception, its selection process, and how it became
one of the most prominent research institutions in the world.

We were also interested in knowing the genesis of his own work his
conceptual approach, his research methods, and the development of his
analogies and syntheses. We hoped he would respond to questions about
interdisciplinary research and evaluate competing trends in linguistics.

I believe the fact that these interviews were conducted in an informal
conversational style allowed us to delve into topics of a highly technical
and substantial nature: Amplifications and explanations were requested and
analyzed further; alternative theories were juxtaposed; active discussion
ensued between points of view and theoretical stands which otherwise hardly
meet each other.

We can all benefit from Professor Li's subtle perception of linguistics
of all orientations. His clinical skill and experiences, along with his
probing intellect will enlighten many generations of scholars.

Ning-Ping Chan, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University of California

23 July 1987
Berkeley, California

ix

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Randy J. LaPolla

The idea to record the oral history of Professor Li Fang-Kuei was first
brought up by Mrs. Li and Lindy Li Mark, Professor Li's daughter. They
contacted the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library, which
had done the oral history of Professor Qiao Yuen-Ren, a close friend of the
Li family. Ning-Ping Chan and myself were asked to do the interviewing, as
we were known to the Li's and both had backgrounds in linguistics. I was
thrilled at the opportunity to learn more about Professor Li and his work;
his books and articles had long ago become one of the cornerstones of my own
studies in Thai and Sino-Tibetan linguistics.

Professor Li's career in linguistics spans over sixty-three years and
two continents. From Ann Arbor to Chicago, where he worked with the greats
of American linguistics, to the Academica Sinica, where he worked with such
luminaries as Chao Yuen- Ren and Luo Changpei, then back to America, where
he taught at Harvard, Yale, and the universities of Washington and Hawaii*
Many of his students, such as Chang Kun, Ma Xueliang, and Nicolas Bodman
have themselves gone on to become bright stars in the firmament of
linguistics. Yet in the interviews we did. Professor Li was always modest
and unassuming. Many times we tried to get him to make a statement about a
person, or take a stand on an issue, but except for rare cases, he would
criticize an idea or person only in the most polite and euphemistic way.
What did come through very clear, at least in terms of linguistics, was that
Professor Li believed in doing careful, data-oriented (as opposed to theory-
oriented) work. In almost all cases where Professor Li did criticize
someone's work, it was usually because that person had insufficient control
of the data he/she was working with, so was just working from word lists.
For the same reason, Professor Li made it clear he didn't think it proper to
be making unprovable claims about the genetic relationship of this group to
that group when there was a lot of work still to be done within each group.
For example, we tried very hard to pin him down on the question of Thai-
Chinese relatedness, though he spoke vaguely about "Well, some people say...
and some people say..." Though I know (from other discussions) that he had
an opinion about this question, he did not want to go on the record with it,
probably because he didn't feel it to be an important question.

We began the interviewing on July 15, 1986. The first interview was an
overview of Professor Li's life, which we fleshed out in the ensuing
interviews. These later interviews were of two types: those that
chronicled events, and those that discussed individuals who were significant
in Professor Li's life and (generally) significant in the field of
linguistics as well. The eighth and last interview was completed on
December 6, though we had hoped that after we had transcribed and edited the
tapes, we could show them to Professor Li and his family, and if there were
any questions remaining, or we just felt it important to add material, we
could do one more interview. Unfortunately, the transcribing and editing
took longer than we expected (as had the interviewing because of Professor

Li's busy schedule and frequent traveling), so Professor Li was not able to
see the transcripts before he was incapacitated by illness in July of 1987.
On the twenty-first of the next month, one day after his eighty-fifth
birthday. Professor Li quietly passed away. Below, I would like to give a
short sketch of what Professor Li felt to be the highlights of his life.

Li Fang-Kuei was born in Canton on August 20, 1902. With the fall of
the Qing Dynasty in 1911, his father, who had been an official in that
government, retired to his native place in Shanxi. The whole family set out
together, but on the way to Shanxi, Fang-Kuei 1 s mother decided that in such a
poor and isolated place (what is now known as Dazhai) the children would not
be able to get a good education, so took them instead to Peking. Times
were hard at first, but their hardship paid off, as Fang-Kuei was later able
to attend the best middle school in Peking, then to enter Qinghua Junior
College.

At first he intended to study medicine, but later developed an interest
in language while learning the English, Latin, and German necessary for his
studies. When it came time for Fang-Kuei to go to the United States
(Qinghua was at that time a preparatory school for those going to the U.S.
to study), he decided to study linguistics. From 1924 to 1926 he attended
the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which he chose because he wanted to
start at a good school, but not one in a large, impersonal city. Professor
Li said two of the most enjoyable years of his life in America were spent in
Ann Arbor, as he did all of the things other college students were doing,
such as going to PAC-10 football games every Saturday. Later, in 1926, he
moved to Chicago and studied under Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Carl
Darling Buck, three of the most important names in American linguistics.

Sapir had the greatest influence on the young Fang-Kuei. From Sapir he
learned phonetics, field methods, and about the languages of the American
Indians. Sapir also had a broad knowledge of developments in the study of
East and South-East Asian languages, and encouraged Fang-Kuei to read articles
in this area. It was Sapir 1 s influence that led Professor Li to take up and
stay with Thai, Sino-Tibetan, and American Indian linguistics. In the summer
of 1927, Sapir took Fang-Kuei to California to do field work. At first they
worked together, but then Sapir sent Fang-Kuei off on his own to look for
the Mattel e Indians. There were only two Mattel e Indians left, and it took
some time for Fang-Kuei to find them, but once he did, he spent a solid
month, seven or eight hours per day, recording their language. His notes,
which he later used as the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation, are the only
record of the now extinct Mattel e language. After a month with the Mattel e,
he spent a month with the Wailaki Indians and recorded their language. It
was memories of this summer, and other field work he did later in Canada,
that seemed the most vibrant and interesting to Professor Li.

With Bloomfield, Fang-Kuei studied Germanic linguistics and the methods
of text analysis. Professor Li said he was Bloomfield's star pupil; he was
also Bloomfield's only student for a long time. Of the lessons he learned
from Bloomfield, one that Professor Li felt particularly important was that
when you are planning to do comparative work on a group of languages, you

xi

should first learn at least one of the languages in that group well enough
so that it is in your head while you are looking at the other languages in
the group. That is the reason why, when Professor Li decided to study the
Thai-related languages in south-west China, he first spent several months in
Thailand learning the Thai language.

With Carl Darling Buck, Fang-Kuei studied Indo-European linguistics,
especially Greek and Latin. At that time, Fang-Kuei actually thought he
would become a teacher of Indo-European linguistics. It was Buck who also
got Fang-Kuei a fellowship to Harvard in 1928. At Harvard, Fang-Kuei
studied Sanskrit for six months, then decided he wanted to go to Europe. He
first went back to Chicago, picked up his degree, and then, with letters of
recommendation from Franz Boas, whom he had met through Sapir, headed off to
Europe to visit linguists there.

On his return to North America in 1928, he spent three months in Canada
doing field work on the Hare language, living the whole time on an island in
the middle of the McKenzie River north of the Arctic Circle, far away from
any other settlements. Then from Canada he returned to China.

On his arrival in Shanghai, the president of the newly established
Academia Sinica invited him to become a member. Professor Li first did some
work on the Chinese dialects on Hainan Island, then returned to Peking and
worked for a while on Tibetan.

On the social side, as a handsome, well educated young man. Professor
Li had his pick of the beautiful young women of Peking, and judging from the
pictures of the young Mrs. Li. it seems he got the prettiest, but there was
a lot more to their relationship than looks. It is rare to see a couple so
much in love after so many years together. One of the nicest things about
visiting the Li's was seeing them interact with each other in such a loving
way. They were married in 1932 and had three children, Lindy, Peter, and
Annie.

In 1933, Professor Li went to Thailand to learn Thai, then went to
Guangxi to study the Thai-related languages there. The value of Professor
Li's work on these languages, especially his Handbook jjf Comparative Tai,
cannot be overestimated. From 1937 to 1939, Professor Li was a visiting
professor at Yale, then he returned to China and spent the rest of the war
years in Yunan and Sichuan, the years 1943-46 as a visiting professor at the
relocated Yanj ing University in Chengdu. In 1946 he returned again to
America, accepting visiting professorships at Harvard, for two years, and at
Yale, for one more. In 1949 Professor Li and the people at the university
there urged him not to go back to China, as the Communists were taking over.
They convinced him to stay in Seattle and teach there. He stayed there
until 1969, when he retired, then accepted an appointment at the University
of Hawaii at Manoa, where he received a second professor emeritus-ship in
1974. He stayed in Hawaii until he moved to Oakland, California in 1985.

Though he retired from teaching. Professor Li never stopped doing
research and publishing. In all he authored nine books, including one which

xii

just came out this year, a monumental work done with W. South Goblin on the
entire corpus of the Old Tibetan inscriptions, and over one hundred articles.

In addition to his academic accomplishments. Professor Li was a
talented artist, both in Chinese and Western watercolors. He played the
Chinese flute extremely well, and enjoyed singing and teaching Kunqu, the
musical drama of the Ming dynasty.

I would like to add a personal note. I feel it a great honor to have
been able to take part in this project, and I learned quite a bit while
doing it, not only about how to do linguistics, but also about the
intangibles that made Professor Li such an exceptional individual. To me.
Professor Li was a giant, and though this giant of a man has passed from our
midst, his footprints are indelible in the soil of linguistics, and memories
of his wit. his charm, and his kindness will always be a part of me.

Randy LaPolla

Department of Linguistics

University of California

August 1988
Berkeley, California

All of this essay except for paragraphs one and three were read by Randy
LaPolla at a memorial service for Professor Li held on August 24, 1987, and
another version of it was published in the Linguistic Society of America
Bulletin, No. 119, March 1988.

I CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION IN CHINA

Chan: Professor Li. we want to begin by getting some background on your

life in China before you came to the United States as a student
in 1924.

Li: Well, you know I was born in 1902, in Canton where my father held

an official position.* I stayed there until I was three or four
or five or six; most of the time. But some years we went to
Gaoyao, because my father held a position for a year or two at
that place. So we all went to Gaoyao, I think we went there
twice, because of his government business.

But that was when I was very young, when I was four, five or
six years old. I don't remember much about that.

After we came back to Canton, we began to have a teacher in
our home to teach my brothers and sisters. But I was only, merely
an appendage, because I didn't really study much in those days.
So, until about 1910 I only began to learn some characters or read
some stories didactic stories, very much like Washington's
cutting down the cherry tree, that kind of story.

By 1910 my father lost his position for some reason or other
that I did not quite understand.

Chan: Was it because of the revolution?

Li: Not yet.

By 1911, the government changed. There was the revolution.

LaPolla: Were you aware of the Xinhai Geming [Republican Revolution] when
it was happening?

*Professor Li's father, Li Guang-Yu, received the scholarly title
of Jinshi through imperial examination while in his twenties.

Li:

Li:

Chan:
Li:

I don't know, I only know that the Qing [Ching] dynasty ended. I
was at that time only nine years old, so I was not interested in
the political shifts at all.

LaPolla: It didn't change your life in any way?

Well, I was too young to know then, but it did change it a good
deal. Because at that time my father practically retired from his
official job. He wanted to be a loyal Qing dynasty man. He
didn't want to serve in the Republican government. We had really
no money from our stay in Canton but he mortgaged our house in
Peking and got about $6,000. He took that, and wanted to take all
of us back to Shanxi Province to a little village or district,
which is now very famous because it's now Dazhai. But at that
time it was a very poor and small village I think it is still
poor. At that time it was nowhere at all.

That was your parents' home, wasn't it?

Yes, that's my hometown. Dazhai. And now I am famous, because
when anybody asks, "Where do you come from?" "I come from
Dazhai. "

So he got the money, mortgaged our house in Peking, and took
the money and all of us to Shanxi Province. On our way to Shanxi
we stopped in Baoding, When we stopped there it happened there
was what in Chinese we called a Bing Bian a rebellion. I don't
know for what reason they started, the rebellion. It was just the
troops rioting, and trying to loot all the people, you know. We
were right in the midst of that, and we lost many, many things in
Baoding. It was only one or two days' business, but we lost
everything on that day.

After that my father continued on to Shanxi, but my mother
changed her mind. She said, "I don't think we should go to
Shanxi, to that small place." The reason she said that was, "I
have children. That's a little village. They must have an
education. In that Dazhai you don't get much education." It was
not good for the children. So she decided that she wouldn't go
back to Shanxi. So my father went alone and she took us all back
after less than a year's stay in Baoding. We came back to Peking
in about 1912 or something like that.

Education in Beijing. 1912-1924

Li:

So we all stayed in Peking from that time on, and I started my
education first in the primary school, later on in the middle
school, and later on went to Qinghua College until 1924 when I

Li: came to the States. That was about life in Peking, education-

wise.

When we came to Peking we were very poor. We had lost all
our money. My father took all the money back to Shanxi and we
were very poor. So, first we stayed with my grandfather and
grandmother on my mother's side, for a very short time.

Chan: The He family, is that?

Li: Yes. But apparently it was not possible to stay long because, you

know, when there are two families living together it gets into
lots of trouble, so my mother moved out and rented a small
sihefang [courtyard-type house], only one part of it, and we
stayed in that. She had to make her living partly, but not
completely. So my mother sold part of her jewelry, and bought one
little house and rented it out, and used the income to live.

That was about the time when I was in primary school. In
1914 I graduated from primary school and went to the middle
school, which was one of the best in Peking, even up to now. It
is still the best middle school in Peking.

Chan: What is it called?

Li: Shifan Xue Yuan Fushu Zhongyue [Middle School Attached to

Teacher's College]. There I graduated in 1918. We had a friend
in the middle school who apparently knew something about Qinghua
College. He suggested that we go to take the examination and try
to get into Qinghua College, because after you graduated from
Qinghua College you would be sent to America to study on
government funds. We didn't have to spend money to come here to
study. *

So three of us from the middle school came to take the exam
ination to go into Qinghua College. We did not go from the very
start, because we had already part of the education, so we went to
the so-called junior college part of the school and we had a very
funny kind of examination to enter Qinghua. One of the
examinations [laughs] was mostly in English, and we hadn't studied
that much English in middle school. In the first place, the
examination consisted of some very strange types of subjects.
First the exam would be something about health, for a program.
And also an examination on woodwork [laughs]. Very funny. All in
English, you know; we never even spoke English in the middle

* Qinghua University was established with money that the Chinese
government was paying America as part of the Boxer Indemnity.

Li: school. It was very peculiar. Then we had geography, in English.

History was examined in Chinese, mathematics in English. Chinese
was in Chinese, of course. So there were only Chinese and history
in Chinese, the rest of them all examined in English.

When we decided to enter Qinghua we had to know what books to
read for the examination. So we got a book on health from the
Qinghua students who had that course, and other courses like
mathematics and geography. We had to read up in English. Because
they examined them in English.

So the three of us went to take the examinations at that
school.

Mrs. Li: Who are the three the other two?
Li: Mr. Zhang Yuzhe,* Mr. Liu Xigu.

But, you know, in those days you went to one school and took
the examination, but you weren't sure you would be admitted,
because the examination was rather stiff. So we had to take the
examination in several schools in order to get into one of the
schools. The other school we went to was an engineering school in
Tianjin, Beiyang University. It was a school in, I think, civil
engineering and mining engineering and so on. In those days, you
know, technology and engineering were very favored subjects for
students to take. A third university we tried to enter into was
the Peking Union Medical School. The three of us decided to try
together.

The schools did not have their examinations at the same time.
The engineering school in Tianjin was probably the first
examination we took. They had it in Peking, and all three of us
went there and took the examination. After a couple of weeks it
came out that all three of us were admitted to that school,
because we passed our examination. Then, of course, we took the
examination at Qinghua College. And the last examination was in
Peking Union Medical School; we were going to take that. But
while we were preparing to take that, we got the news that we had
already passed our examination to enter Qinghua College, so we
didn't take the Peking Union Medical School exam.

*Zhang Yuzhe. 1902-1986, was later director of the National
Institute of Astronomy.

Mrs. Li: [Originally, in Chinese, Xiehe Yixueyuan. then Shoudu Yiyuan.
(Capital Hospital), now once again Xiehe Yixueyuan.]

Li: Yes, it was also called Rockefeller Medical School, because that

medical school was entirely supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation. It is very well known. It's very bad now, not well
kept, but in those days it was very well kept, and the Rockefeller
Foundation every year supported the medical school until the
government changed, that is, 1949s or '50s. Then the Rockefeller
Foundation gave a big sum of money to the medical school and said,
"Now we stop supporting that," because the government was not
favorable to foreign-established schools. But that is something
that came later. We didn't go to medical school because we were
admitted to Qinghua, and we thought that was the best chance, so
we went there.

There were four different places where the entrance
examinations were given. One was in Peking, one was in Shanghai,
one was in Hankou, the other was in Canton. And the result was,
that from all the four places, there were seven persons admitted
to Qinghua. It was very strict.

Mrs. Li: Out of how many, do you know?

Li: That, nobody knows. Because there were four different places.

But in every place there must have been at least about fifty or
sixty students taking the exam, or maybe even more. But there
were only seven persons admitted, and out of those seven the three
of us who came from Peking were admitted. So we finally all went
to Quinghua College, and started school there.

De ci si on to Study Linguistics

Li: After a couple of years at Qinghua College we were asked, "What

are you going to study in America? You have to decide what to
study." At that time I was still interested in studying medicine.
So I said, "I will go to the pre-medical program," which would
require the study of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and
among them also Latin. Because it was thought that in medical
school many terms particularly anatomical terms were in Latin,
so it was best to know some Latin. I think the real reason was
that there was one person who could teach Latin in the school,
[laughs] So I studied one year of Latin.

That was the first introduction for me into linguistic
studies. Then we of course all had German; I had about two or
three years of German in school. And then finally, "Decide now,
what are you going to do?" My first decision was in pre-medical

Li: school, but at the end I said. "I want to change. I want to

change into linguistics, because of my interest in Latin and

German. "

So we were asked, "What school do you want to go to? Do you
want to go to Chicago. Harvard, Columbia?" But we were told that
when you go to America you do not want to go to a big city, like
Chicago or New York. It's too big. you get there and you'd get
lost. So they advised us to go to some small-town university. Yet
it had to be rather a good university. One of those was the
University of Michigan.

II UNIVERSITY AND RELATED EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND
EUROPE. 1924-1929

The University of Michigan. 1924-1926

Li: The University of Michigan is in Ann Arbor, a small town, and the

university jLs the town. I mean, more than half of the population
consists of university students. And in the second place, there
were some very interesting linguistics there there was
experimental phonetics and so on. So I was advised to go to the
University of Michigan.

In 1924 I came to the University of Michigan and got into the
junior class, undergraduate. So I did two years of undergraduate
work at the University of Michigan. That was the most delightful
two years I had in America. [laughs] I thoroughly enjoyed my
student life in America. I joined all the things that the
university students tried to do. Every Saturday I'd go to the
football game, you know. [chuckles] Big Ten football game!
Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, every weekend. And Michigan also
had a very good music program. Every spring there is a spring
festival, and there are concerts and all sorts of activities
connected with the music department.

In Michigan, in those days 1924, that's about sixty years
ago linguistics was not the linguistics of today. It was very
different. So that in choosing that field, my study was studying
the different masterpieces of different languages. One thing I
studied was Latin literature, such as the famous Latin epic
Virgil, and also the Latin dramatists, Plautus, Terence, and Latin
lyric, Catullus and so on. So I spent one year thoroughly going
into the Latin literature, because that was the thing you would
read the language. That was linguistics.

Then another thing was studying the history of the English
language. So I studied first Old English, and after that Middle
English dialects. That Middle English dialect study was
linguistically very important for me, because the professor was a

8

Li: great English philologist. He taught us methods of how to work on

Middle English texts, Middle English has many dialects. And we
were told, "You are reading a Middle English text. Try to find
out what dialect it was written in." So we had very good training
in Middle English.

But I began to feel that English was part of the Germanic
languages, so I began to branch out in to Germanic philology. I
studied also Gothic Gothic is the oldest Germanic language and
then I studied Middle-High German. I read the famous
Nibelungenlied of German literature. So I began to branch out
from English into Germanic languages.

Besides that I took lots of philosophy courses and so on.
Then, in 1926 I graduated from Michigan, with so-called (in those
days) High Distinction, and was made a member of the Phi Beta
Kappa, and also a special ceremony was held. Then I decided to
move to Chicago. So I then entered graduate school in 1926, in
Chicago.

The University of Chicago. 1926-1928

Li: After graduation I went to the University of Chicago in 1926. At

that time Chicago was probably one of the best schools in
linguistics in America.

What I decided to study was determined by who was teaching
what subject. I was only interested in studying with different
professors. At that time in Chicago there were some very famous
(later on) linguists teaching. The head of the Department of
Linguistics was Professor Buck.

Carl Darling Buck. He was a student of who was the famous
German philologist at that time? Well, he was his student. Buck
had written a grammar of Oscan and Umbrian, some old Italic
dialects. He wrote a book on Greek dialects, and he was teaching
me a course called Comparative Greek and Latin Grammar.

I took very careful notes of Buck's lectures. I have a stack
of little cards, notes which he gave in the lecture. Later on, he
published his book, Comparative Greek and Latin Grammar.
University of Chicago Press published it. I looked at my cards,
they are exactly what is published in that book. Very
interesting. Apparently he had that book almost written but not
published, so he just kept on lecturing on it. I happened to take
very careful notes of all his lectures, and when I compared that
with his book, it was exactly what he'd written in the book.

Chan: You could have published it first! [all laugh]

Li: He taught also all the other Indo-European exotic languages, such

as Old Persian, Aveston, Old Church Slavic, and a number of those
exotic Indo-European languages. I think the only language I
didn't take of the Indo-European family was the Celtic family; I
never studied Irish. Perhaps also I didn't study Armenian or some
of those languages, which no one taught in the States in those
days.

So those were all the Indo-European languages. I tried to
get as much as I could in the field.

Then there was Professor [Leonard] Bloomfield, who was in the
Germanic department, not in the linguistics department.

He went to Chicago in 1927 came to Chicago one year later
than I did. I took some Germanic courses with him. He gave a
course on Germanic word formation, Germanic phonology, and also
Germanic syntax, and so on. I took a whole-year course with
Bloomfield, and I was one of his star students because at one time
I was the only student in the class. [laughs]

Then in the anthropology department was the professor of
linguistics, Edward Sapir. Now, he taught phonetics, field
methods, and American Indian languages. His influence on me was
great, because he was always talking to me aside from American
Indian languages, about all sorts of problems in Asian
linguistics. So he would guide me to read all those things
beside American Indian languages, and often talked to me about
various problems, and so on.

Apparently he liked me very much, and so in 1927, after I had
a course on phonetics and field methods, he said, "Do you want to
study American Indian languages?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Okay,
this summer I'll get a grant, and we can all go to California to
study American Indian languages in California."

Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir: Teaching Methods Compared

Li: Sapir came to the University of Chicago in 1925. I think that is

correct, because I came to Chicago in 1926. Bloomfield came to
Chicago in 1927. I stayed in Chicago until 1928, so I had one
year of work with Bloomfield and two years of work with Sapir.

10

Li: Both of them were very nice to me, very kind. But they were very

different kinds of professors. Sapir used to talk about all sorts
of things, very chatty except while he was lecturing. He talked
to me about all sorts of languages, problems, and so on.

Bloomfield did not talk so much, except his assignment for me
to do one kind of work or another. He would sometimes say, "Well,
that you don't know how to do yet, I will explain that to you."
Things such as Panini's Grammar; "It would take a good deal of
time to read it, [laughs] but I'll explain it to you," and so on.

Sapir gave lectures very objectively and fluently, and lots
of people, students, just dropped in on his class for nothing else
except to hear him talk. His English was very elegant, and his
delivery was extremely attractive, so that lots of girl and boy
students they didn't know anything about linguistics but they
wanted to listen to the lectures.

Bloomfield did not talk. He did not lecture very well, and
both of them often talked about their specialties. They would
give you an assignment to read the books, but they never talked
about the books they were asking you to read.

For instance, Sapir would talk about the verbal system of the
Yanna Language. He would spend two or three lectures just on the
verbal system. Bloomfield would talk maybe three or four hours
about the Germanic prefix /ga/ in Gothic (which is later on, you
know, in modern German /ge/, 'ge kommen 1 and so on). But in Gothic
it is used much more extensively, and he wanted to know the
function of /ga/ in Germanic languages. He would lecture for
instance for a week or more on that Germanic /ga/. So they never
talked about the books they asked us to read, they just talked
mostly about the results of their own research. But they were
very attentive to students, so they knew what students did and did
not understand.

The first course I took with Bloomfield was called Germanic
Phonology and Word Formation. After half the quarter was gone, he
said, "Well, there are three students. You two students may write
a short paper on Germanic phonology. Just read your books and
pick out the important phonological changes in Germanic.
Remember, give examples for each of the changes." And then he
turned to me and said, "Well, you don't want to write that kind of
a paper. You write on Germanic word formation." [laughs]
Apparently he knew that I knew more about Germanic phonology than
the other two students.

Sapir never asked students to write papers. He just
lectured. He prepared his lectures well, usually holding a piece
of card when he came to lecture, and then went on lecturing.

11

Peter Li: Did he give exams, if he didn't ask for papers?

Li: None of them gave exams.

LaPolla: No exam, no paper? That sounds like a great system!

Li: Well, Bloomfield was much more academic. He did ask us to write

papers. I wrote that paper on Germanic word formation, and the
other two students wrote papers on Germanic phonology. He'd tell
us how to write it, also. It is easy to write a paper on
phonology, you just read the Germanic grammar and, Tret's see, an
Indo-European 'p' becomes a Germanic 'f, " and so on, and then
give examples for all that. That's all.

The other two students, of course, were Ph.D. candidates in
Germanic languages and literature, but they were more on
literature than on language. "Do I have to take this course?"
They did because [laughs] they had to fulfill a course on Germanic
linguistics. So they just had to take it, and Bloomfield knew
that.

The next quarter in Bloomfield's course the other students
dropped out. They had fulfilled their requirements. I was the
only student enrolled in his course. So he said, "Well, you read
up on Germanic morphology and syntax." "How do you do that?" He
said, "Well, you read up on, say, some Germanic language such as
Old English. You read Old English; read King Alfred's
Pastoral Care, which is about two volumes. You read that, and see
if you find anything about Germanic use of case in Old English.
Don't read Old English poetry; that's tricky. You had better just
read the Old English prose."

So I started reading King Alfred's Pastoral Care, and after a
couple of weeks I reported, "I think there's something about the
use of the genitive in Alfred's English."

He said. "What was it?" I said, "He used the genitive
sometimes with verbs, sometimes with some other kind of use, like
prepositions and so on." "All right, you work on the Old English
use of the genitive."

So I kept on reading the Old English texts, and I gave a
short outline on what I found out. He said, "Well, that's very
good, it's okay, I think nothing has been written on that yet,
about the Old English genitive. Would you like to write a
dissertation on the Old English genitive?"

12

Li: At that time I broke the news that I had my dissertation written

already, on American Indian languages [Editor's note: following
Professor Li's summer in California], "Oh." he says, "That's
fine. Okay." And he kept on lecturing on Panini's Grammar and
that sort of business.

So that was a whole year I spent with Bloomfield.

With Sapir I spent much more time, because out of the class
he was very chatty. He talked also about Sino-Tibetan, about
Burmese, about Thai, about Tibetan, and so on. He would often
refer me to read some of the publications, you know, on Chinese.
"Have you read [Bernard] Karlgren's Phonologie Chinoise?"* I
said, "No, I haven't read that yet." He said, "Well, you'd better
read that." And, "Have you read Maspero's Le Dialecte de
Changan?"** "No, I haven't read that." So, "You'd better read all
these. "

He would assign all these things for me to read on Sinology,
and then he asked me to read books on Thai grammar. He was
particularly interested in Tibetan. He said, "There are lots of
books on Tibetan in the library. You can take a look at that.
There is a very famous Tibetan! st in Chicago. He is the curator
of the Chicago Museum, Mr. [Berthold] Laufer." He said, "You can
try to contact him to see if he has anything to say."

So I wrote to Laufer. and Laufer was very brusque. He said,
"I have nothing on Tibetan at all." So I never got anything out
of Laufer. I think Laufer was rather depressed; I don't know
why. He was depressed, and as you know, Laufer jumped from the
stairs above the museum and killed himself. So there must have
been something psychologically wrong with him at that time. But
anyway, I got nothing on Tibetan from him except that he said,
"You can read Jaschke's Tibetan Dictionary." So I started reading
the Tibetan Dictionary, and so on.

But Sapir talked about lots of things, gave lots of
references to read. You could never finish that in a couple
weeks, but he gave you lots of references. Apparently he must
have read all of those things, because he just got it out of his
head. But he kept on lecturing about American Indian languages,
which was his specialty.

* Etudes sur la Phonologie Chinoise

** Le Dialecte de Teh' ang-ngan sous les T'ang

13

Li: Very soon that year's time I spent in Chicago was up. But after

the first year, Sapir gave me some American Indian Athabaskin
material to work at, and then he told me that in the summer he was
going to northern California to do some field work on American
Indian linguistics, and am I interested to work on field work on
American Indian linguistics? That, of course, was exactly what I
wanted to do. I wanted to get some experience of how to do field
work on languages that I knew nothing about. He said, "Okay, I
have some funds, enough to support you."

Field Work on Indian Languages in California, 1927

Li: So in 1927, first we took the train and got to Berkeley. There,

of course, Sapir had lots of friends in the anthropology
department. One of them was Professor [Alfred] Kroeber. Kroeber
and Sapir were old friends. So he stayed with Kroeber and put me
up in the faculty club to spend a couple of days.

He consulted Kroeber and said, "I am bringing a Chinese
student to study American Indian languages. It will be the first
time a Chinese student studied American Indian languages."
[laughs]

I think Kroeber gave him some news about the local situation
here, and I think one of the things was about where we were going
in Humboldt County, Eureka, where the Hoopa Indians were located.
He said, "There the people are against Chinese." What was the
reason they were against Chinese? Because in those days there
were some Chinese settlements there. The Chinese got into a so-
called "Tong War." The Chinese began to shoot at each other. By
mistake, one of the parties shot the mayor of Eureka, and killed
him. And that, of course, angered the whole city. And they asked
all the Chinese to leave Humboldt County, so that there was no
settlement of Chinese in Humboldt County. That was, of course, a
difficulty which happened to me, because I was not supposed to
stay in Humboldt County. A Chinese they may have to evict me out
of there.

Sapir learned this in Berkeley from Kroeber, because he knew
the local situation. So when I got to Eureka, we both stayed in a
very high-class hotel. And when we got to Hoopa Valley Sapir
arranged to have the Department of the Interior, the Indian agent
who stayed in Hoopa Valley, write an official letter from the
Department of the Interior to say that I am asked to work on
Indian languages in Humboldt County, as evidence that I was some
how connected with Washington D. C. [laughs]. So I got that letter.
I didn't know all of that until I got the letter. He said, "Here,
you take this letter, and in case there is trouble you can ."

14

The Hoopa Indians

Li: We both took the train from Berkeley north to Eureka, which is the

northern point of California. And from Eureka we took the bus to
the Hoopa Valley, inland to the Hoopa Indian Reservation.

My interest was, of course, to work with Sapir for a couple
of weeks just to get his field method of how to work on a grammar
which we do not know, both it's phonological system and its
grammatical system and so on. I learned a good deal of field
methods from the two weeks that I spent together with him.

Peter: He didn't lecture on his field method?

Li: No, no. He didn' t lecture. He'd just sit there, I'd sit there,

and the informant would sit here. He'd ask, "How do you say this?
How do you say that? How do you say, 'I am gone'? "He is gone'?"
All those grammatical points. The Indians would just translate
that, his questions, and he and I, both of us, started out writing
our own notes. He didn't ask me whether I got it or not. [laughs]

One thing I learned, a technique, was this: when you ask an
informant to say something for you, do not imitate him. Just
write what he said. If you have to imitate, you imitate after the
series of questions have been asked. Then you repeat it, say, "Is
this the way you say it?" If the informant says "yes", that means
your record is right. If he says "No, I say that that way," then
you know that you did not record it correctly. But don't say, as
soon as the informant says, "I am gone," "Oh, I am gone"

Don't do that. If you do that, you confuse your informant.
Because you may imitate him wrongly. He may correct you once,
maybe even twice. But after twice, he will say, "Okay, if that's
the way you insist." [laughs] You confuse your informant, you
don't know whether you are right or wrong, and he will not correct
you anymore. He'll say, "Okay, that's right, that's right, that's
right," no matter how wrong you are. [all laugh] So you better
not imitate your informant; just write it down and afterwards
repeat it. If he understands it, it must be right. If he doesn't
understand, he will correct you.

Chan: But he will ask the informant to repeat something?

Li: No, you can ask him, "Say that again?" But do not ask him too

often. If you ask too often he'll get the informant gets tired,
you know. "Okay, that's right, that's right." So do not imitate
your informant, and do not ask him to repeat too much. Because he
will get tired of your asking. He will think, " Oh, you will
never learn it."

15

Li: The Indians usually had this kind of notion, that the white people

will never learn it.

That's the way some of the techniques you learn by asking
questions and so on. So after two weeks we worked from about
nine to twelve and two to five every day, and in the evening we
would look at our notes and file our cards and so on. It was a
very tedious day, and in the summer in Hoopa Valley it is like
Sacramento Valley in the summer; it is very hot. So after a
couple of weeks he said, "We will take a rest." I said, "I
thought we never took a restl"

Anyway, he said, 'Let us take a walk to a nearby Indian
village." So we walked to that village and we found an Indian
lady who spoke the Yurok Indian language. So: "We'll take a rest
and learn some of that." [laughs] So we started asking similar
questions about the Yurok language. I forget whether it was Karok
or Yurok, but some kind of Indian language.

Those languages, of course, were very different from the
Hoopa. There are lots of the speaker would very often whisper
consonants and vowels at the end of the sentence. Very much
sometimes like Japanese: at the end of the discourse is "ssssss,"
something like that. So I was very much surprised because I never
had that kind of experience before.

We later on did two or three trips to there. He did more but
then I left Hoopa Valley to go on on my own.

The Mattole Indians

Li: After a few weeks he said, "Well, now you can go. You know all

the techniques of how to ask questions, how to handle your
informant. Now you can go and try to look for the Mattole
Indians. "

The Mattole Indians were known to be along the Mattole River,
but they were supposed to be extinct. That is to say, all the
Mattole Indians had died. But there was news that there were
still one or two still alive. One of our projects was to make a
record of all those Indians that were still alive, because after
that, that language would be dead; it would be no more. As a
matter of fact, that is the case.

I took the material of the Mattole Indians after I got to
that place and did about four or five weeks of recording texts and
grammar and so on. After I left, I know that all the Indians of

16

Li: that tribe died, so my record of that language is still the only

record of the language.

After I left Hoopa Valley I went to some place called
Fortune, in order to look for the Mattole. So I wandered around
all over that area in a taxi, asking where the Mattole Indians
were. It was a kind of wild goose hunt.

But some people said, "Well, further south along the Mattole
River you may find some Mattole Indians." There was no bus or
anything but a kind of a so-called post truck, that sent letters
from one village to the other. So I took one of those trucks and
went down to a small town called Petrolia. It was called Petrolia
because it was thought at one time that there would be oil in that
area, so that little town was called Petrolia,

I stayed in a hotel and started asking whether there were
Mattole Indians there or not. They said, "Veil, yes there are
Mattole Indians, but they are on the mouth of the Mattole River on
the Pacific Ocean. There is one family we know there who are
Mattole Indians." It was about, oh, three or four miles from
Petrolia.

The only thing to do for me was to take a walk to the mouth
of the river, and so I started walking. There was just the
Mattole River going one way, so I forded it one way, and forded
back and forth the other way, until I came to a farm house. I
found it too hard to walk further (some 10 miles), so I borrowed a
horse from a farmer. I said, "Can you lend me your horse so I can
ride it to the mouth of the river?" The farmer was very nice, he
said, "Yes, you can take my horse." He started to put on the
saddle, you know, for me, and I said, "I want a very old, very
good-tempered horse, because I never learned how to ride."

He said, "Oh, this is an old horse." He said, "Now you take
this, and if you follow the river, you'll go down and get to the
place. When you come back, take the horse to the stable." He
didn't want to have any money paid.

So now the first time I took a trip on that horse, and went
down to the mouth of the river and met these two old Indians. One
was very old, seventy something, the other was about forty, fifty,
something like that. I started asking them questions about their
language.

The old man. I think was blind or something.

I asked them, "Will you teach me how to speak the Mattole
language?" He apparently was willing. I said, "It is impossible
for me to make a trip every day to your house. You have a horse.

17

Li:

Peter:
Li:

Lindy Li
Mark:

Li:

Lindy :
Li:

You can ride down to town every morning, and I will provide you
with a lunch at the hotel, and after we work, about four o'clock,
you can ride back, and I'll pay you for your trouble."

At that time I inquired of Kroeber what was the normal rate
to pay an informant. This is important, because you have to know
the local rate in order not to pay more than the University of
California, you see. Because that would have spoiled their game.
Kroeber said, ''Oh, pay him about forty cents an hour." Forty
cents an hour, for one day of six hours. "You pay him two dollars
something, and you give him a lunch." At that time that was quite
sufficient; forty cents an hour was the going rate for the
University of California.

So I told him, "I am going to pay you forty cents an hour,"
and he was happy because he wouldn't be able to get anything,
normally. So he came every day to me, and I got some material for
a little bit over a month.

I found him very dull, a very dull person. He didn't know
how to get your point, what you asked. And he could not I said,
"Can you tell me a story?" I thought I would give him . No, he
didn't know how to tell story. [all laugh] It is a difficult
thing. You do get informants that cannot tell stories. If you ask
you, yourself: "Can I tell me a story?" You'll search, but you
may not be able to find any story to tell.

So he could not tell a story.
This was the younger person?

Yes, the old man could not come out; he was blind and over seventy
years old. He could not come to me.

He probably knew the stories.

I got mostly grammatical material, like "I come, you come, he
comes," and so on. This kind of grammatical material which you

could easily get from him.
and so on.

Or, say, "I go from here to there,"

So, after a little over a month I found that this was getting
a little bit the, how would you say it? Economically it is
called what, the limit of returns?

Diminishing returns.

You stay longer, you get less,
another Indian tribe."

So I said, "I had better try

18

The Wailaki Indians

Li: So I left Petrolia and went to another county; not Humboldt, but

Mendocino is that the name of it? I went to Round Valley. I
knew that there was an Athabaskan tribe called the Wailaki, and I
got an old man, a Wailaki old man.

He was called Tip, old Tip. I got hold of him and asked him
to give me information about the Wailaki language. I stayed there
about another month.

The language was not particularly interesting.
Peter: Why do you say it was not interesting?
Li: Oh, because there was no funny sounds in it. [all laugh]

So, my summer was gone, you see. Two weeks in Hoopa Valley,
one month in Petrolia, another month in Round Valley, so it was
over two months of this three month vacation gone. So I wrote to
Sapir and said, "I called a stop, I am going back to Chicago."

After that I went back to Chicago and made my report to Sapir
about the work that I did.

Sapir wrote a small article in the University of Chicago
magazine, the student magazine, about this field trip. You'll
find that my picture was in that article, because he talked about
me going to study American Indian languages. He says, "Mr. Li is
the first Chinese student studying American Indian language. He
rescued an American Indian language for us," and that's true
because that was Mattole. Mine was the only material you have on
that language. Then he told what kind of work he was doing and
how important field work is for anthropology and the linguistic
student.

This was the article in the Chicago magazine. [shows
magazine] And there, that's my picture over there, [laughs] "An
Expedition to Ancient America."

Mrs. Li: Who sent you this magazine?

Li: I think South Goblin. He looked at this and said, "I read

something about you, do you want a copy?" So I said, "Okay, make
a xerox copy." You see, here it says, "Mr. Li."

This was first of all a report on his [Sapir's] own work on
the Hoopa, and then about my work. Oh yes, here he says, "Mr. Li
proceeded to the Round Valley reservation, where he made the
records of the Wailaki language, another Athabaskan dialect. The

19

Li: combined party therefore succeded in making a rather complete and

adequate record of no less than three Athabaskan languages in the
course of the summer's work." That was Sapir and me.

Bloomfield. Sapir. Boas, and Others: Field Work Methods Compared

Li: Well, you know, in those days the linguist did not go to the field

to study language, he took books. And that's what you learned
your language from, either Latin. Greek, or German, or English.
You just used your book. But this was one of the more modern ways
of learning a language going out in the field.

Chan: Did Bloomfield engage much in field work? Was he as interested in

field work as Sapir?

Li: Bloomfield? Yes, Bloomfield did a lot of work on American Indian

languages too, you know. He was an Algonquin specialist. He even
did some comparative work on Algonquin languges and wrote a
historical phonology of so-called Central Algonquin. There are
several groups; he only limited himself to Central. Like Fox and
some others. So he was one of the distinguished American Indian
linguists in America in those days.

There were about three or four people who did distinguished
work, one was Franz Boas. He was really the grandfather of the
American Indian people. And there was Michael son, who was also
working on Algonquin languages. Then Bloomfield worked on
Algonquin languages, and Sapir worked on different languages.
Kroeber did a lot of work, but Kroeber confessed that he was no
phonetician. His record sometimes is not very dependable. Then
there is Dickson at Harvard University. He did lots of American
Indian work. But he is also not very dependable, his records.
Then there is Godard. Godard worked a good deal on all the
Athabaskan languages, including Hoopa and so on. But Godard's
phonetics is also very poor; his ear is very poor. He often
confused consonants.

For instance, the word there is a consonant "k", but Hoopa
will pronounce it as /ka/. Then there is also another word /qa/.
Well, /ka/ and /qa/ are two different kinds of case, but he
confused them very often. That, of course, makes phonology,
particularly comparative phonology, very dangerous.

Lindy : How did you find out about these mistakes?

Li: Sapir worked on another Athabaskan language in Canada, and the two

are distinguished. There is just no reason the Hoopa should
confuse these two, so he knew that Godard made a mistake. But

20

Li:

Chan:
Li:

Chan:
Li:

Godard worked on many Athabaskan languages when he was very often
undependable on such minor phonetic and nice points.

That's not minor.
Yes, it's also minor.

So Sapir went to work on Hoopa again, becaue Hoopa has some
very peculiar phonetic points, and he wanted to make . And
Godard was very angry, because if you work on Hoopa and I come
into your field, intrude into your field But Sapir didn't care
about that. So Godard became very antagonistic toward

Chicago school!

Sapir and also complained to Boas. Well, this was a kind of
professional jealousy. "You don't come into my field, that's my
area. "

So later on Godard wrote some paper against Sapir 1 s theory
about Na-Dene languages and so on. But that's over now.

Franz Boas

LaPolla: Could you talk more about Franz Boas?

Li:

Yes. Franz Boas at the time I first met him was working with
Edward Sapir, and I think Bloomfield. Three of them were members
of a committee for the promotion of American Indian languages. I
think some foundation gave a sum of money to this committee to
study American Indian languages. At that time, of course, so very
few people wanted to study American Indian languages except
scholars at Berkeley and there was no money for fieldwork at that
time. So this foundation gave money to Boas, Sapir, and
Bloomfield, three persons as the members of the committee for this
study and promotion of American Indian languages.

It was the first time that we made use of the money. Boas
was traveling from New York to Chicago. He met with Sapir and I
was fortunate to also meet Boas at that moment. Then Boas went to
the Northwest to Washington State and also. I think, perhaps to
Canada, too. He was interested in, I think, Nootka, or some other
northwestern languages. He brought with him Jacobs; that was
Boas's student. So the two of them were traveling across the
United States and I met both of them in Chicago. Sapir was taking
this opportunity to bring me to northern California to work on the

21

Li: Athabaskan Indians. That is Hoopa Indians, Mattole Indians, Bear

River Indians; they're all Athabaskan Indians. So we went from
Chicago, after we met Boas, and we came to Berkeley.

Completing the Dissertation and Exams for the Ph.D.

Li: When we got back I started writing out my report on the Mattole

language. I came back about late August, September, and I
finished my report about Christmastime. I sent it to Sapir and
said, "Now I finished this very small book of about 150 printed
pages." Sapir took a look at my report and said, "Well, I think
it's good enough for a doctoral dissertation. Why don't you
present that as your dissertation?"

This was about January or February of 1928. I said, "I never
thought about that. In the first place, I never even put in a
request saying I am a candidate for a Ph.D. degree. I didn't even
send anything like that to the university. So I don't think I can
do it." Sapir says, "That's quite queer. Why don't you go to the
registrar's office, you send in a request that you want to be a
candidate for your Ph.D. degree."

But then I was involved in certain university regulations.
They said, "Okay, your request for candidacy to a PhJ). is okay,
but there are several things you have to do. First, a candidate
must pass a French and German examination. So you go to the
department and say, 'I want to take a French examination and a
German examination.' But then you have to get your examination
passed nine months before you can receive your degree." It was
about February when I applied. "Your degree can't be given to you
until November or December of this year. Earliest you can get it."

So I said, "Well, I don't care when I get it. But if I have
to do it, I'll do it." I went to take the French examination, and
they give you, of course, a passage of a French text, and you
translate that into English. And I went to take the German exam.
The German instructor who gave me the examination looked at me and
said, "What do you come here for?" I said, "I come here to take
my German exam." He had been in the same class with me for
several seasons, mostly in Germanic phonology and Germanic
linguistics and so on. He said, "Why do you come here to take
this examination?" I said, 'Well, I have to take it."

So I passed my German, passed my French examination, and so I
was formally a candidate for a degree. My dissertation was
already written, you see. The head of the department was
Professor Buck. Very nice man, one of the most distinguished
Indo-Europeanists in those days.

22

Li: Buck, Bl cornfield, and Sapir, those three were my teachers and

three important members of the linguistics department. They came
to have a conference, and said, "Now he took all the courses he
can take." Indo-European courses: I took a course in Sanskrit; I
took a course in comparative Greek and Latin grammar; I took a
course in Old Slavic; I took a course on Lithuanian; I took all
the Germanic courses; Old Norse and so on. "He has taken all the
Indo-European courses that we can offer. In American Indian
courses he wrote a dissertation and took all the courses that
Sapir offered," and so on. "So what's the use of keeping him here
until the date he receives his degree?"

Buck says, "Well, we'll send him to Harvard." So Buck wrote
a letter to the graduate school dean of Harvard University and
recommended me for a scholarship in Harvard to spend the next
year. And of course. Harvard gave it to him.

So I packed my luggage and went to Cambridge. Harvard's
conditions were very generous. They said, "You can take courses
or not take courses. You can do whatever you want to do this
year while you are at Harvard." But if you do not take courses,
it is nonsense.

To Harvard University for Six Months, 1928

Li: But Harvard, in those days, is no linguistics even today it is no

center of linguistics

Chan: It still is not.

Li: Yes. [all laugh] So I didn't want to take any linguistics

courses. The linguistic courses that they had what was the man's
name, the head of the linguistic department? Actually he was the
head of Indo-European linguistics. He was an Englishman.

This is Clark. Professor Walter E. Clark. There was a well-
known tradition of Sanskrit studies at Harvard, starting from
Charles R. Lanman and others.

So I took Vedic. I also took classes with Clark, and
another visiting professor. Professor Stael von Hoi stein. We
started to read some Buddhist Sanskrit texts. This text was
edited by Stael von Hoi stein together with some Tibetan
translation of that. So, I also learned some Tibetan from that
course. Because there is Sanskrit, and there is Tibetan, and
there is also a Chinese translation of that text.

23

Li:

Now Clark only knew Sanskrit, but he learned Tibetan. He couldn't
learn Chinese, [laughs] Stael Holstein knew how to read Chinese,
and I read Chinese, and I learned to read Sanskrit and Tibetan.
So we had a very interesting group, three or four people, two of
them Harvard professors. We went on with the so-called high
Buddhist Sanskrit texts together, learned some Tibetan and so on.

After about half a year I thought that was enough for me. I
told Harvard, "I want to go to Europe, take a look." And Harvard
allowed me. They said, "Okay, if you want to go you can go. We
won't keep you here."

So from Harvard I came back to Chicago, took my degree, and
made a trip to Europe: first to England, then Paris, then to
Berlin.

The Trip to Europe for Three Months, 1929

Li:

Lindy :
Li:

Lindy :
Li:

LaPolla:

So from that point, about February or March, I sailed from New
York.

In Germany and I met a famous German musicologist
Hertzog?

Hertzog's teacher. He was a musicologist. I forget his name.
Oh, von Hombostel?

Hornbostel, yes. I met him in Paris, and he was interested in
collecting records of primitive music. He said, "The university
has certain equipment." You know, very primitive wax cylinders
and also a very simple machine to record. He said, "You buy a set
of that and go back to China and record some primitive music for
us and send it to us."

So I brought that machine back to China and did record some
songs, particularly the Thai people's songs, and sent part of it
to Germany, to Hornbostel. By that time Hitler was in power in
Germany and Hornbostel, of course, was a Jew. He had to go to
England. So nothing happened anymore with that batch of records
which I had sent him.

When you went to Germany, you mentioned that you had a letter of
introduction from Franz Boas.

24

Li: Yes, after I got through with a half year's work at Harvard

University, I thought I'd better go to Europe, so I came to New
York and looked up Franz Boas. Franz Boas says, "I'd like to
write you some letters to people in Germany." One was to a well-
known scholar, somehow I forgot his name. He used to work on some
languages in Chinese Turkestan on which they had found some
manuscripts. He [Boas] wrote me a letter to him and wrote me a
letter to someone in Hamburg. This person is a good experimental
phonetician. Boas still believes in that experimental
phonetician. So he wrote me two letters to Germany.

I met Boas' friend. He was very nice. He was a quite famous
man. He was a member of the Royal Imperial German Academy. He
was old, pretty old. He usually didn't see anybody but Boas was
his old friend so he saw me. He showed me how he studied Chinese.
He says, "I studied Chinese by studying Manchu first," because
there are so many Manchu texts, the translation of old Chinese
texts; for that reason he began to read Chinese by using Manchu
translations of Chinese.

In Germany I began to also take a course in German, because I
didn't speak German in those days. I had to learn to speak it.
And in Germany I met a scholar, a professor Walter Simon. He
later on went to teach in London as professor of Chinese in the
School of Oriental Studies in London University. His son, of
course, as you know, is in Australia.

Walter Simon, of course, was fairly young. In America, he
would probably be called an instructor, but in Germany he was
called a privatdocent [a private teacher who gets his salary not
from the state but from the students]. We began to talk about
Chinese linguistic, historical linguistic problems, and also talk
about Sino-Tibetan things.

At that time, he was writing an article on a comparison of
Tibetan and Chinese, something like that. At that time, Karlgren,
a well-known sinologist, wrote an article in T'ung Pao
criticizing, even scolding, Walter Simon for his comparative
Chinese and Tibetan. Yes, I think that book is called
Word Comparisons Between Chinese and Tibetan. So that was who I
met. Then and there I became very good friends of Walter Simon.
From that time on we often corresponded about Tibetan stuff.

We talked about problems in Chinese linguistics. You see, I
had no knowledge of Chinese linguistics at all in Chicago. Nobody
taught it, incidentally, in any American school in those times.
The 1920s, you know. Many of them would just teach Chinese. What
would they teach? You get Mencius and then say, "Now you
translate it." Learn the characters: you translate that into
English, and that's your Chinese lesson in those days. Very
different from what it is now.

25

Li: Simon lived in Berlin's west section called Grunewald. And we

would go to his home and have tea and we would start walking
around the forest, you know, the Grunewald forest. We'd talk
about, oh, Karlgren's reconstruction of Old Chinese. You know,
Karlgren criticized Walter Simon very seriously. I tried to say
that Karlgren was too critical, and he said, ''Oh, Karlgren has
that tendency." That means he had the tendency of discouraging
any young people from working in his field. You know, he would
criticize so badly that people would say, "Oh, I can't work in
that field."

So I told Simon, TCarlgren's a little bit too critical toward
young scholars." And Simon was very much impressed by my
observation, [laughs] So we became very friendly. We talked
about his work. He had a short paper called "Old Chinese Rhyming
Systems," something like that.

Later on when I met Karlgren, many years later, I asked him,
"What about Walter Simon?" He said, "Oh, yes, I recommended him
to London University."

I became a highly respected person later, when the Chinese
University was established in Hong Kong. I became one of the
advisors to the president of the Hong Kong University, I think
because of Walter Simon.

Field Trip to Study the Hare Indians, Canada. 1928

Li: And then from Europe I came to Canada, because I got money from

Sapir's funds to do another American Indian language in Northern
Canada. This time it was way up to the Arctic Coast. I was there
a very short time because there was no airplane, nothing. You
could only take the boat down the MacKenzie River. It took about
three weeks to go down from Edmonton to the place where I wanted
to go, which was called Good Hope. It was one of those trading
stations of the famous British trading company, Hudson's Bay
Company.

I went there and tried to find an Indian, but the Indians in
the summer all went to the river, on an island. It was important
to them because they had to get all the fish they could get in the
summer. In the winter they needed all the fish they had to feed
the dogs they call them huskies. Because in the winter it snowed
and they could travel only by dog teams, and the dogs were pulling
the dog sleds from one place to another. Every day they gave
every dog one fish. This was fish they dried during the summer.
They'd give them one fish, and the next day they started off
again, and at the end of the day they'd give the dogs another

26

Li: fish. So they had to provide a fairly large number of dried fish

for the winter use. They were all on that island to try to get
fish.

I went to that island and got somebody to work with me on the
language, called Hare. But time was very short, and there was no
place to stay on the island. There weren't any houses on the
island, we had to pitch a tent. Well. I didn't know how to pitch
a tent, and I didn't have a kitchen, stove, you know, to cook
things. I didn't have anything; I was not prepared for this kind
of life. But I had to be there, so I borrowed one tent from the
Hudson's Bay Company back in town, and I got some blankets to put
on the floor, and then an Indian took me and said, "Now you have
your tent, you need poles to put it up." I said, "Okay, I'll go
with you." So the old Indian went into the forest, I followed
him, and he cut down five or six spruce saplings for posts, and
said. "Now we can go back." I think he cut six. and he said.
"I'll take four poles, you carry two. back to your tent." So I
carried those two poles back to my tent the first time I ever
pitched a tent. I didn't know how to pitch it, so he helped me.

Then I brought some canned food something like Hungarian
goulash. You opened it up and then ate it. I bought ten or
fifteen cans of that, and about a hundred eggs

Mrs. Li: One hundred eggs?

Li: Yes, for one month. And a few cans of fruit, like peach or pear,

because there are no fruits up there. Since I had no stove, I
borrowed one tin can for putting gasoline in. I borrowed one of
those as my stove. Everyday I went into the forest to get some
dry wood as fuel, got back and made a fire, and then put my eggs
or fish or what ever I had in and cooked my own breakfast, lunch,
dinner on that thing.

Well, the first few days were okay, because I had eggs and
canned Hungarian goulash. I just heated them up. But soon I was
out of that, and the first thing I was out of was bread; there was
no bread. You cannot keep bread for about a week or month or so,
so I couldn't take that much. I had those so-called sailor
biscuits, about that size [gesturing], dry, so you can keep them
for months. I had those things, but they also soon ran out. So I
had no bread.

I asked the Indians where they thought I could get some
provisions. The Indians said. "Well, up there there is a cabin.
There was a trapper who trapped animals, foxes and so on. Now, he
may have some provisions in his cabin. We will go there and try
to borrow some from him." I said, "Okay," and went with the
Indians to that cabin. We found he had some flour which I could
bake into something edible.

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27

Li: But the trapper was not there. They said. "Just pay him some

money, and leave it. and take whatever you want." So I took some
flour, that was all I wanted. I had lots of salt, because they
keep the eggs on salt. After I got some flour we came back to the
tent and I began to bake some something. I didn't know how to
bake. I couldn't bake bread because I didn't know how to bake
bread. What I was trying to do was bake something like the
biscuits, but I didn't know how. You have to put some yeast or
something, you know, to make your bread [all laugh]

Mrs. Li: Raise the dough.

Li: I put something in, but it didn't bake. The whole thing became a

solid piece of [all laugh]. But I had to eat it because that was
the only thing I could do. So I had very hard biscuits for a
while, too hard even to chew. I had to eat it, so I used a knife
and sliced them into slices, put that into water to boil. Then I
could at least eat it, I had something to eat,

Soon my Hungarian goulash was no more, my eggs were all
gone

Mrs. Li: All the eggs became solid.

Li: The eggs became rock: one piece. You can only keep them so long

and then they become solid. It smelled terrible, so we had to
throw that away. The only thing I could get then was fish.

The Indians got lots of really good fish, not big. So I
asked them, "Every day, would you give me one fish?" It didn't
cost anything, because they got hundreds and hundreds of fish
every day. So they gave me one fish.

I had to eat one fish every day, so I cut the fish into three
parts. In the morning I'd eat the head, at lunch I'd eat the
middle, and for supper I ate the end. Fish for dinner, fish for
breakfast, fish for lunch. That was okay. The only thing was
that I had nothing to cook the fish with; the only thing I had was
salt. No ginger, no nothing, except salt.

Mrs. Li: No jiangyou [soy sauce].

Li: [laughing] Of course no jiangyou. So I ate fish every day for

two or three weeks. Strictly a fish diet. From that time on, for
a year or so after I returned to China, I could not eat fish.

Mrs. Li: And you didn't like eggs for a long time.

Li: For a long time, yes, because they got smelly.

28

Li: Well, after several weeks of that kind of funny dieting I thought,

"I've had enough of this kind of life." It was interesting
because that was just above the Arctic Circle, and the sun never
sets. The whole day the sun simply dips and goes up in the sky,
like this. You have daylight all day, so that if you're not
careful you will get into the next day without knowing it.
Sunlight all day and night. It was interesting, because in the
night you don't see any sun. but after a certain day in fall the
sun begins to dip, and you get slightly something like the
afternoon, that dark. Then you see the Northern Lights floating
along, like a cloud. It is quite interesting.

So after some weeks up there I figured the time was up for
me. I had to take the boat up the MacKenzie River back to
Edmonton. That was going against the river, so the boat went very
slow. In some places because by that time the water was low and
the current was very fast, and the boat going up the rapids it
couldn't go up. It would go up here and then the water would wash
it back, it would go up there and it would wash it back. For a
week or so the boat simply went up and came back again. We
couldn't do anything, we just stayed there and ate. Finally there
was another boat coming down, and they threw a line to the other
boat. This boat went up and pulled our boat up the river through
the rapids, and then we could go on.

So while we were waiting for the boat to go up there were
some other passengers on the boat one was a dentist, another
something. I don't know so we started playing bridge on the boat.
We spent our time playing bridge all day.

Mrs. Li: You knew how to play bridge at that time?

Li: Oh, a long time before. I learned to play bridge from Shanghai to

America: two weeks on a boat, nothing else to do except play
bridge.

Mrs. Li: Too bad there was no mahj ong game on that ship.

Li: Oh, no, mahj ong was not fashionable on the boat. It was

fashionable on the boat on my way back to Shanghai, [laughs]

29

III RESEARCH IN CHINA. AND TEACHING ASSIGNMENTS IN THE UNITED
STATES. 1929-1972

Return to China, 1929

Li: When I came back to Chicago to take my final oral examination for

the degree, after leaving Harvard, Sapir asked me, "You did a lot
of American Indian work, what are you going to do? You've got
your degree, what are you going to do?"

I said, "I want to go back to China," He was surprised, but
he said, "Well, if you want to go back, that's good. I'll get
you a fellowship to go to China." So he got that fellowship from
the Rockefeller Foundation to send me to China, with all travel
expenses paid to China and a monthly allowance, $200-$300 a
month, American money. That was probably higher than many
professors got. in China. [laughs] "I'll get you a fellowship
to go to China." Then he said, "If you find China not suitable
to you, you can, still with the fellowship, which provides you
with traveling expenses, come back to the United States." It was
a very generous grant. So I said, "Okay," and I took it.

But before returning to China I went to Europe for about two
or three months. Then, as I told you, I did another summer of
American Indian work on the Arctic Coast. After that, in the
fall, I went back to China. That was at the end of 1929.

I took a Canadian Pacific Line boat, I think it was called
Empress of Britain or something. There were many Chinese going
back to China on that boat too. I was in a regular cabin. The
Chinese usually were in the steerage. In the steerage there were
a lot of things going on. One of the things was gambling. One
time [laughs] they had a number of coins in there, and everybody
guessed, odd or even. Lots of them, of course, earned lots of
money, thousands of dollars, and tried to go back to China to
give it to the family and so on. But on the way to China some
lost all the money they had, so instead of getting off at Hong
Kong, they would stay in the boat and come back to work for about

30

Li: ten years again. That was one of the stories about Chinese

laborers. They saved about a thousand dollars, but on their way
back to China they gambled all the money away.

Mrs. Li: What did you play in your group?

Li: Well, we didn't play anything. We just went around and looked at

the things. There were some friends on the boat, too.

Appointment as Research Fellow in the Academia Sinica

Li: I went to Shanghai. The director of the Academia Sinica. Cai

Yuanpei, was told that I was coming back, probably by Y. R. Chao.
I had written to Y. R. Chao saying that I was coming back about
this time. So when I arrived at Shanghai. Cai Yuanpei sent a
research fellow to the boat to meet me. He didn't come himself
but he sent a delegate to the boat saying that they made a
reservation at the hotel for me and hoped that I could go with
him back to the hotel. Well, this was the first time I was back
to China after four or five years' studies in America. I was
then only twenty-seven years of age; quite a young man.

I went to the hotel and the next day Cai Yuanpei invited me
to a dinner at his home. There were quite a number of big shots:
Cai Yuanpei, the director of the Academia Sinica; Yang Quan; and
also a famous Chinese geologist, Li Siguang. Later on, Fu Sinian
came down from Peking and we had a nice talk. They said they
were going to offer me a research fellowship at the Academia
Sinica in the Institute of History and Philology. I told them
that I cannot accept this position because I already have a
fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

They said, ''Okay. We'll reserve the position for you but we
will not pay you any salary because you have your salary from the
Rockefeller Foundation, but we want you to have this nominal
position anyway as a research fellow of the Academia Sinica. It
would be easier for you to travel in different places in China
with an official position. If you have only the Rockefeller
Foundation behind you, well, [laughs] what is a Rockefeller
Foundation?" So, okay. okay. I said. "I'll accept the position
but not salary."

31

Research on Hainan Island, 1930

Li: From Shanghai I went up north to Peking and met Y. R. Chao there.

I met people who were studying Chinese linguistics, Chinese
dialects, because Y. R. Chao was always interested in Chinese
dialects. After a couple of weeks in Peking, I came back to
Shanghai and from Shanghai went to Canton, to the south. In
Canton I began to look around to see what I could do there. I
even heard some Yao language in Canton.

Then I, all of a sudden, thought that I should go to Hainan
Island. It was very difficult to get to Hainan Island in those
days, but since I had the money I took a boat from Hong Kong. I
went back to Hong Kong, took a boat and got to a port in Hainan,
called Haikou. I went there and began to listen to the Chinese
Hainan dialect of that area. It struck me that the so-called b
and d's are not the same thing as voiced ones. People always
thought they were voiced b and d's, but I thought they were not.
I thought they were so-called implosive b and d's. Very similar,
later on I found out, to the Vietnamese b and d's and, also, very
similar to the Thai b and d's. But then I did not know; I knew
only that I had never heard these very peculiar phonetic sounds.
So I just traveled a little bit along the coast from Haikou to
Lingao and south to Lehui. I could not go into the mountains in
those days; it was impossible.

So after about a month there, just working around, I came
back to Canton. Having found a Hainan speaker, I wanted to make
some simple phonetic experiments about their b and d's. So I
borrowed some instruments from the medical college of Canton
University and I made some very crude instruments out of a
cigarette tin box. The tin box I put over my mouth, drilled a
hole on the other side, with a rubber tubing connecting it to a
so-called rubber tembor, so if I blew with my breath through the
tin can the air would go through the tembor. If you blow into it
the needle will go up; if it is implosive, the needle will go
down. So, in this way, I experimented with the Hainanese
implosive consonants. I did turn out to be quite right that the
air actually goes in. It's a kind of implosive consonant, no
doubt about it.

And with that I made a report to the Academia Sinica saying
that I had done some experiments with the b and d's in the Hainan
Island Chinese dialect, and that they are not ordinary voice
consonants but are implosive consonants. That report was in the
report of the Academia Sinica to the government.

32

Decision to Study Thai. 1930*

Li: After I got through with Hainan Island, I went back to Peking.

The whole year was fully wasted doing nothing so I came back to
the Academia Sinica. They said, "We'll offer you a research
fellow." I said, "All right, I'll accept that." I sent a letter
back to the Rockefeller Foundation saying that I had got a job in
China; I didn't need the fellowship any more. From that time on,
I became a research member of the Academia Sinica and started my
research work on linguistics. The Academia Sinica did not make
you work on any particular thing: you chose your own, whatever
you wanted to study.

Y. R. Chao was working on Chinese, particularly Chinese
dialects. I said, "I don't want to study Chinese dialects.
There's one person, that's enough, with his assistants and so
on." So I had to fool around with other subjects. One of them
that I did study was Tibetan. So I started working on Tibetan
and I wrote an article on Tibetan at that time.

LaPolla: On the development of the initials?

Li: Yes, Tibetan initials. It was quite a young beginning type of

work.

I also fooled around with Chinese, early old Chinese
phonology, because Y. R. Chao was not interested in old
historical phonology; he was only interested in dialects. I also
wrote some articles on Chinese historical phonology and then
Tibetan.

Then I felt that I probably should work on some non-Chinese
languages in China. There are, of course, several choices. You
can choose some Turkish languages, all from Chinese Turkestan, or
you can go to Tibet to do Tibetan work, or you can go to various
non-Chinese languages in China. One of them, of course, was
Guangxi's Tai languages.

Now, at that time, there were some very practical
restrictions. It was very difficult for us to go to Chinese
Turkestan in those days because of the political Russian and
some other problems. So that was out. Go to Tibet. That was
also very difficult. We could not go to Tibet because, you know,

*The usage is Thai for the Siamese language, and Tai for the
language family as a whole or the dialects in China. [Randy
LaPolla]

33

Li: the Dalai Lama was against the Chinese government and so we could

not go there. If we did go, we'd have to go to India and from
India into Tibet and that's very difficult to travel.

No, the only thing left for me was in Guizhou, Guangxi,
Yunnan and such places. The best place would be Guangxi because
that's easy to travel; Guizhou was very difficult to get into;
Yunnan, also, was very difficult to get into. Guangxi was, of
course, well known for its Tai language but nobody was making any
extensive study of the Tai dialects in Guangxi or around that
area. I thought probably I should spend some time studying this.
But I wanted to know something more about the Tai language which
is well known to most scholars and that is of course the Siamese
language. A lot of people worked on that. There were lots of
written documents. In Guangxi, the Tai language had no written
documents. So in order that I could study these languages more
efficiently, I said I should go to Thailand to study the Thai
language first.

Trip to Thailand to Learn the Thai Language. 1933-1934

Li: I talked to Y. R. Chao. Y. R. Chao was a very, very good and

generous fellow. He said, "You want to go to Thailand? Okay. I
will provide you with the money."

In those days I think the Academia Sinica was very liberal.
very generous. You could study whatever you wanted. And you
were also provided with some money, too. That was the generous
policy of Y. R. Chao. So I went from, at that time, from
Shanghai. You know, to get to Thailand was very difficult, too,
because China had no diplomatic relations with Thailand. We
could not get a visa to Thailand. So we had to go to Thailand
via Singapore and around Singapore take the train going up to
Thailand. So I went to Singapore first.

In Singapore there was a Chinese consul general; there was
also a Thai consul general. Since they were all diplomatic, you
know, officials together in Singapore, the Chinese consul general
and the Thai consul general knew each other as diplomatic
colleagues. So I went there, trying to contact the Thai consul
general through the Chinese consul general, and he says, "Okay,
I'll give you a visa. I can stamp your passport. Now you should
have no trouble going to Thailand." And that way I got the first
visa to Thailand. I took the train from there to some famous
place, where there was an inn that was very nice to stay in.

34

Li: There was a Thai minister staying there, Phya Damrong. Phya

Damrong was there because he was an exile from Thailand because
Thailand was having political trouble and he was the uncle or
somebody of the Thai king. So he was exiled and he was staying
there. The Siamese consul told me that Phya Damrong was in that
place, "You'd better go there. Perhaps you can see him." So I
stopped over and saw Phya Damrong and talked a little bit. He
was very, very nice. He asked me to see somebody in Thailand,
also a prince. You know, Phya Damrong was also a prince.

After I left him, I took the train to Bangkok. It happened
that I also obtained a letter from a Chinese in Shanghai, who had
friends in Bangkok because they came from the same district; you
know, from the Chaozhou, Shantou yidai [area]. So when I got
there, I looked up this Chinese friend and he found me a little
house, a two-story house, and rented it for me. In those days a
house was very inexpensive; something like twenty dollars a
month. So I went there and got a house and I procured two
teachers: a boy who was also a teacher at some school and then a
girl who was also a teacher at some other school.

So I began to study Siamese. Part of the time was for
conversation, part of the time was for reading. I began to read
very intensively. That is not the rule here; now, you don't read
anything, you learn first to speak the language. But I'm still
old-fashioned so, aside from learning to speak Thai, I also read
Thai, and also read some Thai poetry, and I read some very exotic
reading material, as I wanted some very deep stuff on the history
of Thailand. They said, "Well, that's too hard for you. History
of Thailand." I said, "I don't mind. I'll learn it." So I
learned to read texts; I learned to speak Thai, neither of them
pretty well but after three months I had a pretty thorough
general knowledge of the Thai language.

Research on Guangxi Tai Dialects, 1934

Li: After that I went back to China. The next year I went to Guangxi

to study the Tai language there. I surveyed about ten or fifteen
Tai dialects in Guangxi and did some more extensive work on two
dialects. I collected lots of texts and vocabulary besides
phonology and so on. One of them was the Lungchow dialect.
Lungchow is a city which is just on the border of Vietnam, so I
wrote a monograph on the Longchow dialect. It happened to be in
one of the important Tai group of languages in the southwestern
part of Guangxi Province.

35

Li:

Chan:
Li:

Later on. I studied a dialect called the Wuming dialect. The
Wuming dialect happened to be in another Tai group in Guangxi
Province. I wrote a monograph on that. That happened to be one
of the so-called Northern Tai dialects. So in that trip I wrote
a monograph on this Southwestern Tai dialect and also on a
Northern Tai dialect. It happened to be that these were the two
important groups of Tai dialects in Guangxi Province, so I fairly
covered the whole area in about the two or three months I was
there.

Then I went back to Nanking. I think the Academia Sinica
from Peking had moved to Nanking because of the Japanese threat
to Peking. I started working on the material that I had
obtained, such as the monograph on the Lungchow dialect and later
on the monograph on the Wuming dialect. All of them were being
worked on at the time of the Japanese invasion. This is the
Wuming Dialect Report and this is also the Wuming Dialect Report.
You see, these two were two different editions. [shows the
books ]

This edition, Zhongguo Kerueyuan, was published by China
when China was lost to the Communists. [laughter] But they,
nevertheless, published this manuscript of mine. The manuscript
was already finished but not printed, so that they printed it and
only last year this fellow gave me this volume. He says, "You
probably don't have it yet." [laughs] He gave this to me. It
was published in 1953. This was [ruffles through papers]
something from the general phonology and the number of Chinese
borrowings and so on. The interesting thing was I gathered,
besides the texts, quite a number of songs. I collected a fairly
large number of songs. This was the pronunciation and then this
was the translation, but these songs were also written in their
own script.

They are different from Chinese? This one is.

They are different, highly different from Chinese. It's from
Chinese but you know, you can make different kinds of characters.

LaPolla: So they didn't use the Thai writing system?
Li: Thai writing system, yes.

LaPolla: This is for the Taizu [Tai nationality in China] but they didn't
use the normal Thai alphabet based on DevanagarL This was their
own system based on Chinese characters, right?

Li:

36

It's very much like the Vietnamese writing,*
principle but they are different, of course.
Chinese characters.

The same kind of
They are made up of

At that time too, I began to write papers on Thai
linguistics, really small articles.

Translating Bernhard Karlgren's Etudes sur la Phonologie Chinoise

LaPolla: When did you work with Luo Xintian [Luo Changpei] and Chao Yuen-
Ren in translating Bernhard Karlgren's book on Chinese phonology?
Was that just an isolated project or had you later changed back
to Chinese phonology?

Li: That was in 1930, about.

LaPolla: Nineteen thirty you started?

Li: More than 1930, about '31 or something like that. This was again

Y. R. Chao's idea. Y. R. Chao was interested in Karlgren's
Etudes sur la Phonologie Chinoise which was in French. The
Chinese students in those days did not read French very easily.
They could read English all right, but they could not read
French, so Y. R. Chao wanted to get that translated into Chinese.
He had corresponded with Karlgren to see if we might translate
his book into Chinese. Karlgren agreed but he thought that his
book was not really worthwhile translating.

Chao had already started translating a little bit of that,
in his leisure time, but then he came to America to become
director of Chinese students in Washington, D.C., and he wanted
in the first place to get this thing finished. In the second
place, we were all very poor. The government did not pay our
salaries, so we had no money to live. We discussed the problem
with Hu Shi. Hu Shi had control of the American Boxer Indemnity
Fund. So we discussed the problem. We said, "We have no salary
and we cannot do any work. The government has no money to pay
us." He said, ''Okay. We will pay you to translate Karlgren's

phonology. That, is not a salary but is for your work,
will pay you your salary according to the work you do
translating. "

So we

* He's referring to the Vietnamese writing system, used before
romanization, which was based on Chinese characters.

37

Li:

LaPolla;

Li:

LaPolla:

Li:

At that time Chao Yuen-Ren was not in China, but in America so
I and Luo Changpei, the two of us, were involved with the
translation project. Hu Shi paid us to translate it. After a
few months, the government situation became better. So we did
our first draft of the translation of Karlgren's work. Chao
later on came back. Because Chao translated one part. Luo
Changpei's friends did another part, and I and Luo Changpei
translated the third part, all the terminologies were not quite
the same, [laughs] So it had to be made uniform through all the
three different parts. Of course. Ding Shengshu was the one who
put the whole translation into a readable shape. He was the one
who finally made the whole manuscript translatable. Then it was
published, largely due to his work. I was then, at that time,
fooling around with Tai languages.

Did Huang Kan do actual reconstruction before Karlgren did, or
was Karlgren really the first to do actual reconstruction? Some
people say Huang Kan did reconstruction of ancient Chinese before
Karlgren did, but Karlgren was first, no?

Huang Kan did not do any reconstruction at all, no.*

You mentioned a few of the projects that you had at the Academia
Sinica in the early days, but you didn't mention language reform.
In the 1920s, wasn't there a lot of language reform going on by
Hu Shi and Y. R, Chao and others in terms of establishing Guoyu
[national language] and trying to think of ways to simplify the
writing system and that kind of work?

No Guoyu. in our institute. Institute of History and Philology,
because it is philology [that is emphasized] At that time, Mr.
Chao. Y. R. Chao. was interested in Chinese dialects and he was
still interested in Chinese dialects even when he was here. He
teaches. So he at that time did one piece of Wuyu, study of the
Wu dialects, and he also went to Canton to study the Canton
dialects. Also he went to Jiangxi, the Jiangxi dialects, so he
surveyed different Chinese dialects. He had with him Luo
Changpei. who also worked on Chinese dialects and other
assistants and so on.

It was for this reason I lost interest in Chinese dialects.
I didn't want to touch Chinese dialects anymore. I don't like
Chinese dialects, so I started to work on different languages in
China.

* More on reconstruction in Chapter V.

38

Teaching at Yale University, 1937-1939

LaPolla: What did you do when you completed your research on the Guangxi
Tai dialects in 1934?

Li: After 1933, the institute was in Nanking because of the Japanese

threat to Peking. So we moved to Nanking. I continued my work
on dialects. In 1937 Yale University offered me a j ob of
visiting professor in the Oriental Studies Department. I
accepted that position. They gave me an appointment for three
years, but Academia Sinica said, "We can only give you two years
of leave." So I accepted for two years and came to the United
States. It was 1937 when the Japanese came to attack Shanghai;
that was the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War.

In 1937 I brought my wife and my two children, Lindy and
Peter the whole family to New Haven. It was a very unfortunate
year for me because I fully expected Sapir to be at Yale, my old
teacher. But unfortunately Sapir got sick. He lived in New
York, and had a heart attack, so that he was no longer teaching,
for that year anyway.

I was in New Haven two years. I gave a course on Chinese
phonology. Of the people who came to take my course (there were
very few students who knew anything about Chinese phonology,)
there were two students famous persons who came. Two
professors from Harvard, one was [Serge] Elisseef, director of
the Harvard Yenching Institute, the other was Professor Ware, who
came every week from Boston to New Haven to come to my class,
[laughs] It was very interesting. But really I did very little
teaching; that was the only course I taught. Also, I had never
taught in China; this was my first teaching position. So I was
in New Haven for two years, 1937 to '39. After my two years of
leave was through, I went back to China.

From New Haven, across the continent we took our time. We
drove. We saw Salt Lake City, Grand Canyon, and came to
California to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, we came up to San
Francisco. We took about two or three months to drive all the
way to San Francisco.

Mrs. Li: We visited two world's fairs on our way.

Li: At that time there was a world's fair in New York and there was

also a world's fair in San Francisco. Why did they have two
worlds fair's at that time one in New York and one in San
Francisco?

39

Li: When we reached San Francisco, we took a boat to Hawaii- At that

time, Professor Chao was in Hawaii and we visited him and stayed
there for about two weeks. He was on the way from Hawaii to Yale
University to take up the position I left at Yale. So we had a
nice time, swimming and so on, in Hawaii. Hawaii, in those days,
there were no high rises. All very flat.

Return to China; Research and Teaching. 1939-1946

Li: So, after two weeks we took the boat back to Shanghai and he

[Y.R. Chao] took the boat the same day from Hawaii to San
Francisco. We had left our old car in San Francisco. He drove
it back to Yale.

We went to Shanghai, because at that time, we could not go
to where the Chinese government was located. The Chinese
government was now in Chungking and all the coastal provinces
were occupied by Japan. So we went to Shanghai because Shanghai
was still Zujie [Foreign Concession]. We still could get in there
and from there transfer to a boat to Haiphong [Vietnam] and then
to Kunming. In Kunming at that time was the Xinan Lian Da
[Southwestern Union University], and Academia Sinica our part.
So I went to Kunming. During all the war years Kunming was
bombed and the government was not able to pay us except twenty or
thirty dollars a month. At that time Kunming was very expensive,
so we moved to Sichuan. We stayed in Sichuan for a couple of
years in a small place called Lizhuang and I did some field work.
I did some surveys of different languages in Guizhou. So that's
where I picked up the material for the Kamsui languages in
Guizhou and also some Miao languages.

After two or three years there I went to Chengdu and
accepted a visiting teaching job at Yenching University, where I
got better paid. Because Yenching, you know, still got money
from America. I was there from about 1943 to '45, teaching and
also doing research. I also did a good deal of travel.

Teaching at Harvard University. 1946-1948. and Yale University, 1948-1949

Li: And then I got an offer from Harvard as a so-called visiting

lecturer in 1946, so I decided to go to Harvard. The whole
family in 1946 came to Shanghai from Chengdu and we tried to make
our way to Harvard. In those days it was difficult to travel
because there was no official airline, there were only some
airplanes for the government troops. The boats well, there was

40

Li: a longshoreman's strike and no boat came to Shanghai. We were

stranded in Shanghai, and I had to go to Harvard. The real
reason was I had to be there in order to get my salary, otherwise
I wouldn't have money. And we were stuck up in Shanghai.

So we managed to have a navy airplane fly me from Shanghai
to Honolulu to San Francisco. The family couldn't take the
plane, because they wouldn't allow ladies to take the navy plane,
so I came here first and they later on followed when the boat
service was resumed. They came to San Francisco on the boat. I
first went by airplane to Harvard.

I was at Harvard two years working on the Harvard-Yenching
Dictionary. That was not very interesting; that job was very
unsuitable for me. I am a linguist, not a dictionary-maker. So
after two years at Harvard, I said, "I'm not coming back, I'm
going to leave Harvard." And I got, again, an appointment at
Yale University for another year, from '48 to '49, as a visiting
professor. So I was there again at Yale teaching for one year.
I had some very good students. Nicholas Bodman was my first
student there.

The University of Washington, 1949-1969

Li: I was hoping to come back to China in 1949. So we drove across

to Seattle to go back, but when we reached Seattle the Chinese
situation entirely changed. The government was no longer
capable and the Communist regime began to take over the whole
country so we could not go back in 1949. So we got stuck