It is with great sadness that we learnt of the sudden passing of Prof. Pang-hsin Ting.

Prof. Pang-hsin Ting was native to Rugao, Jiangsu Province, China. He was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on October 15, 1937. He graduated from National Taiwan University where he obtained his BA and MA degrees. Later he studied in the United States and gained a Ph.D. from the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. He served as Research Fellow and Director at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica; Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Professor of Chinese Linguistics and Agassiz Professor at University of California, Berkeley; and President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. In 1986, he was elected as Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan. In 2000, he became an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America.

A knowledgeable and rigorous scholar, Prof. Pang-hsin Ting enjoyed a distinguished reputation in academic circles. He made outstanding contributions to research in Chinese history, dialectology and phonology, Austronesian language studies, and historical comparison between Chinese and Tibetan languages. He was author of several monographs, such as The Origin and Evolution of Languages in Taiwan, The Origin and Evolution of Dialects in Taiwan, Papers on Linguistics by Pang-hsin Ting, Papers on Chinese Linguistics, On the Homology between Chinese and Taiwanese Languages, Lecture Notes on Phonology, and Phonology: Questions and Answers. In 1991, 1999 and 2002 respectively, he published two papers titled “Some Theoretical Issues in the Study of Mandarin Dialects” and “Evolution of the Initial Consonants *g and *γ in the Min Dialects” in the monograph series of Journal of Chinese Linguistics and one paper titled “‘Special Words’ in Chinese Dialects—Coincident Exceptions” in Journal of Chinese Linguistics.

The passing of Prof. Pang-hsin Ting is a great loss to the community of Chinese linguistics. With this message, the editorial board of Journal of Chinese Linguistics would like to express our deepest condolences and pay our highest respect to him.