Memoriam: John Defrancis, August 31, 1911-January 2, 2009
缅怀德范克教授, 1911年8月31日--2009年1月2日
Victor H. Mair 梅维恒

John DeFrancis, renowned teacher and linguist of Chinese, died at the age of 97 on January 2, 2009. In this tribute to John, I shall not dwell on the extremely interesting story of his life, inasmuch as that has been covered well in obituaries in the New York Times (January 19, 2009, p. A21), online at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/us/15defrancis.html?partner=rss&emc=rss>

and elsewhere, e.g., Yale Daily News (January 16, 2009)

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/27082

There is also a wonderful Website for John at

http://johndefrancis.wordpress.com/

with plentiful biographical details and lots of photographs. Suffice it to say here that John was a socially committed and politically active individual who also was unusually adventurous and gregarious. What I wish to do in this necrology is give a brief accounting of John as a teacher and scholar of Chinese. Perhaps the easiest way to approach John’s academic career is to divide it into four stages: student, teacher, researcher, and lexicographer.