Ting Pang-hsin

Ting Pang-hsin was a Chinese linguist, and an academician of the Academia Sinica.

Biography

Ting was born in Ju-kao County, Kiangsu, on 28 November 1936. After the defeat of the Kuomintang by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Ting relocated to Taiwan. He attended National Taiwan University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1959 and master's degree in 1963 both in Chinese literature. He went on to receive his doctoral degree from the University of Washington in 1969.
Ting worked at the Academia Sinica after university. He was elected assistant research fellow in August 1964, associate research fellow in February 1970, and research fellow in August 1975. In August 1981, he was named acting director of the Institute of History and Philology, confirmed in March 1985. He was a professor of National Taiwan University from 1975 to 1989 and the University of California, Berkeley from 1989 to 1998. During his tenure at Berkeley, Ting held the Agassiz Professorship of Chinese Linguistics from 1994. Ting was In 1996, he was chosen as dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a post he kept until 2004.
Between 1993 and 1994, Ting replaced William Shi-Yuan Wang as president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. He was succeeded by Mei Tsu-lin.
Ting died in California on 30 January 2023, at the age of 86.