The complete works of Fang-kuei Li: A review of Li Fanggui quanji (李方桂全集)
[译] 李方桂先生完整的学术文献：书评《李方桂全集》
Tsu-Lin Mei 梅祖麟

Abstract 摘要
The publication of the Complete Works of Fang-kuei Li (李方桂) in 13 volumes is a major event for Chinese linguistics (linguistics of the languages in China). The project was conceived by Ting Pang-hsin in 2003. He divided Li’s publications into 13 volumes, and for each volume he invited other linguists to be editor or co-editor. As the appended table of contents shows, the team of editors are mostly Li's students or students of Li's students, for example, Ting Panghsin, Mei Tsu-Lin, Gong Hwang-cherng, Xing Gongwan, South Coblin, Dai Qingxia, Lin Tao and Wu Tsung-chi. Volume13 (Chinese translation of Fang-kuei Li, Linguistics East and West: American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai, an oral history conducted in 1986 by Ningping Chan and Randy LaPolla (1988)) appeared first, in 2003. Volume 4 (the monograph on the Tai dialect of Wu-ming) came out in 2004, and other volumes followed in intervening years. Now with the completion of the Chinese translation of A Handbook of Comparative Tai by Ting Pang-hsin, all thirteen volumes are in print. Ting Pang-hsin is to be congratulated for conceiving this ambitious project in the first place, for assembling a team of like-minded scholars to carry it out, and for bringing the project to a successful completion after ten difficult years. Thanks are also due to Tsing Hua University Press for agreeing to publish the Complete Works. Why is it necessary to publish Li’s complete works in Chinese and in China? The question can be answered under three headings. (1) Li's monographs on individual Tai dialects (such as the ones on Wu-ming and on Lung-chou) are in Chinese, but his comparative work such as A Handbook for Comparative Tai (1977) and The Tai and Kam-Sui languages, Lingua 14 (1965) are in English. The publications in English are usually not available in China. Now volumes 2-8 make available in Chinese all of Li's writing on Kam-Sui and Tai linguistics, and this will surely be a boon for research in China. (2) Li's early papers on Old Chinese phonology, written in the thirties against Karlgren's OC reconstruction, are difficult to understand in English. Consequently, Chinese translation will make these papers more intelligible. (3) Karlgren’s Etudes sur la Phonologie chinoise (1915-26) was revised and translated into Chinese by Yuen-Ren Chao, Luo Ch’ang-p’ei and Fang-kuei Li and published in 1940 by the Commercial Press under title Zhongguo yinyunxue yanjiu 中國音韵學研究. This book has long been out of print in China. The Complete Works includes this classic as volume 12. In short, the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica since its inception in 1928 has been promoting the scientific study of languages and dialects of China, and Fang-kuei Li was one half of the total effort, concentrating on the linguistics of non-Chinese languages in China and in neighboring countries. In the Complete Works we get 50 years of cumulative scholarship of the highest order. We also get to see how a master of the craft applies the same linguistic and philological principles to the study of four different groups of languages: American Indian, Old Tibetan as preserved in inscriptions, Kam-Sui and Tai, and Sino-Tibetan.