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Academician Jen-Kuei Li's Personal Profiles

Professor Li was born on a farm in Yilan, Taiwan, in September 1936. He knew some plains aboriginal people, who also spoke Taiwanese, when he was young. He was unaware of any difference between the Chinese and plains aborigines then. He worked on his PhD in linguistics at the University of Hawai'i 1967-70. Several faculty members were specialized in Austronesian languages, so he gained some understanding of the languages. He went to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), Melanesia, to do some fieldwork in the summer of 1968, and was fascinated by some of the linguistic features there. In the next summer, he was invited to write language lessons for the Kosrae language spoken in the East Caroline Islands, Micronesia, which manifests a different type of linguistic structure. All these languages are genetically related to the aboriginal languages in Taiwan. He then planned to return Taiwan to work on a Formosan language for his PhD dissertation. Professor Fang Kuei Li arranged for a permanent position at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica for him. Ever since he returned to Taiwan in June, 1970, he has been working on all the major Formosan languages and dialects, including some of the Plains languages that became extinct, for which he has collected various written documents and put them into order. He also traveled to the Philippines to do some fieldwork on a language of the Negritos and the languages on the Batanes Islands, closely related to Yami spoken on Lanyu.

Professor Li got his linguistic orientation from professor Yu-keng Lin at National Taiwan Normal University. Several professors had much influence on his linguistic career, including Fang Kuei Li, Stanley Starosta, Byron Bender, and George Grace at the University of Hawai'i. He was encouraged by the late leading Austronesian scholars, Otto Dahl and Isidore Dyen. He has received tremendous support and assistance from a fellow Japanese linguist, Shigeru Tsuchida, whose broad knowledge of al Formosan languages and dialects is extremely valuable and helpful, over all these years.