Zhengzhang Shangfang facts for kids

Zhengzhang Shangfang (9 August 1933 – 19 May 2018) was a Chinese linguist, known for his reconstruction of Old Chinese.

Zhengzhang was born as Zheng Xiangfang (郑祥芳 Zhèng Xiángfāng) in Yongjia County, on the outskirts of Wenzhou. As 祥 and 尚 have the same pronunciation in the Wenzhou dialect, his personal name became Shangfang (尚芳). While in high school, his parents changed his family name to Zhengzhang, which combined his father's surname Zheng with his mother's surname Zhang.

At this time, he became interested in historical phonology and studied the works of Yuen Ren Chao, Wang Li and others at Wenzhou's library. In 1954, unable to enter university to study linguistics due to familial reasons, he attended the Beijing University of Geosciences and began geological work in the Beijing area. In his spare time, he continued to develop his own ideas on Old Chinese phonology, particularly the finals and vowel system. In the 1960s and 1970s, he undertook dialect survey work in Wenzhou for Lü Shuxiang until he was sent to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution. During a period when the factory was closed due to a factional battle in the Chinese Communist Party, he began exchanging ideas with Pan Wuyun and Jin Shengrong, and refined his Old Chinese system to a six-vowel system. Essentially the same system was independently developed by William Baxter (building on a proposal by Nicholas Bodman) and by Sergei Starostin. In 1980, he joined the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.