Mei Tsu-lin (梅祖麟), a leading academic of historical Chinese linguistics, passed away on Oct. 14 in Ithaca, New York, Academia Sinica announced on Friday.
He was 90.
Mei was an elected member of Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology since 1994.
Photo: Screen grab from Academia Sinica’s Web site
His research focused on Chinese historical grammar, Chinese historical dialectology, the morphology of Chinese characters and Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics, according to Cornell University, where Mei taught from 1971 to 2001.
Mei’s time at Cornell saw him achieve the status of Hu Shih professor emeritus of Chinese literature and philology while chairing the university’s Department of Asian Studies and directing its East Asia Program.
Following his retirement from Cornell, Mei became a visiting professor at prestigious academic institutions around the world, including National Taiwan University and National Tsing Hua University, as well as Stanford University in California, Beijing University, the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing, Tsinghua University in Beijing and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Mei became president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics in 1994 and was also a member of Taiwan’s Association of Chinese Phonology.
Academia Sinica said that Mei’s professional achievements were preceded by his prestigious education, having attained a doctorate in philosophy from Yale in 1962.
Cornell said that he received a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in 1954 and a master’s in mathematics from Harvard in 1955, where he also taught from 1964 to 1971.
Academia Sinica said that Mei heavily contributed to the research of modern Chinese grammar and dialectology alongside old morphology.
Mei’s efforts in tracing the grammatic and phonetic development of the Chinese language became a tool used in literary criticism, Academia Sinica said, adding that Mei also proposed that Sanskrit had an impact on modern Chinese poetry.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the
RSS