Zheng-Zhang Shangfang 郑张尚芳 In Memoriam

Zheng-Zhang Shangfang, a truly gifted and devoted scholar of Chinese historical linguistics, Chinese dialectology, and Sino-Tibetan linguistics, passed away in his hometown, Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on May 19, 2018, at the age of eighty-five.

Zheng-Zhang Shangfang, Zheng-Zhang, or Zheng-Zhang Xiansheng, to his colleagues, friends, and students, was born on August 9, 1933 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. He was a self-taught linguist. He did not attend university and did not receive any formal linguistics training. Living in China during the 1950s and 1960s, being without a university degree meant that he had to find all linguistics books and learn all his linguistic knowledge by himself. In order to have access to a collection of linguistics books, he worked in a local library for five years, starting as a volunteer. He would jokingly say that he graduated from "University of Wenzhou Library". With the help of his friend Pan Wuyun and others he hand-copied many thick reference books, such as the Chinese translation of Karlgren's Études sur la phonologie chinoise and Shen Jianshi's Guangyun Shengxi, both which he borrowed from fellow scholars who supported him. Aided with his incredible knowledge of traditional documents and his unyielding passion for Chinese linguistics, he excelled in all the linguistic fields he studied. His knowledge, his academic curiosity, his passion, his devotion, and his creativity were all exceptional. The combination of these qualities made Zheng-Zhang a unique scholar. To many, he was a miracle and a genius in Chinese linguistics.

Zheng-Zhang had a strong passion for language when he was young. But for social reasons, he could not attend university. After he graduated from high school, he worked for a geological prospecting unit and a machinery factory, as well as teaching at a private school. But his strong interests in linguistics never changed. He used his spare time in pursuit of his linguistic studies. In the 1950s and 1960s, his talents in linguistics caught the attention of stellar linguists in China, such as Wang Li, Lü Shuxiang, Yuan Jiahua, Wang Fushi, and Li Rong. They all paid close attention to Zheng-Zhang's professional development in linguistics and provided him with professional support and even financial help to prevent him from suffering from poverty. In the early 1960s he wrote to Wang Li at Peking University regarding the reconstruction of Old Chinese phonology. His talent was immediately recognized. Many of his suggestions were highly appreciated and accepted by Wang Li. In 1964 he joined the group of dialect surveyors based at Hangzhou University. In the same year, his important dialect report "Wenzhou Yinxi" (phonology of Wenzhou) was published in the Zhongguo Yuwen (Studies of the Chinese Language), one of the most prestigious linguistics publications in China, at the recommendation of Li Rong. The length of his article (about 60,000 characters, 34 pages) was almost half of the whole volume of that issue, one of the longest articles ever published.

His linguistics profession was interrupted in the period of 1966–1976, due to the Cultural Revolution. But his passion never wavered. In 1978 he participated in a writing group at the Wenzhou Normal University for the Hanyu Da Cidian (Grand dictionary of Chinese). He also started communicating with scholars studying Old Chinese phonology around the world when such communication finally became possible. His study was appreciated and supported by leading scholars internationally.

In 1980 he passed examination and, as an exception, became an associate research fellow at the Institute of linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), which is the premier academic organization and research center of China. At CASS he worked under the direction of Li Rong and was assigned to dialect surveys. He was promoted to full research fellow in 1991 and retired from the linguistics institute in 1994. After his retirement he worked as an adjunct professor at Shanghai Normal University and Nankai University and continued producing significant scholarly works. Never stopping his work, he spent his 80s as the editor in chief of the Wenzhou Fangyan Wenxian Jicheng (A collection of the materials of the...