Professor Tang Ting-Chi (湯廷池)

The demise of Professor Tang Ting-Chi (湯廷池) was a great loss not only to the Tang Family but also to his friends as well as his students and the linguistic fields in Taiwan.

I got acquainted with him in the late spring of 1945 when both of us were freshmen in Shinchiku Middle School (Hsinchu High School) in Japanese-occupied Taiwan. As air raids by American airplanes were very frequent in Hsinchu at that time, the teaching was carried out in a few temporary branches in Hsinchu countryside elementary schools. My father was an English teacher of the Middle School and assigned to teach in its Tofen Branch. He took me there with him. Ting-Chi was in that Branch and introduced himself to me. As his mother and my mother were both graduates of the famous Taihoku (Taipei) Girls High School, we quickly became friends.

After Japan surrendered to the U.S. and Allies unconditionally on 8/15/1945, we were taught under the Chinese Education System. During our Junior High School years, my good friend from Peipu, Chiang Hung-Min (姜宏民), my previous classmate from Shinchiku Elementary School, Liu Yuen-Chung (劉遠中), and Ting-Chi’s friend from Chunan, Tsai Ching-Hui (蔡鏡輝) joined us, and we all became intimate friends, forming so-called “Group of Five”. Ting-Chi was an eldest, brightest and most knowledgeable among us and assisted each of us including me grow mentally and intellectually and also in various ways during our junior and senior high school years, for which I was grateful to him. After we entered the National Taiwan University, we pursued our respective careers and contacted less often, but our friendship has lasted till now – 75 years.

In 1965, when I and Delphine Yang got married in New York City, Ting-Chi kindly helped us and our families as the moderator of our wedding banquet in Hsinchu. In 1972, after he completed his PhD degree at University of Texas at Austin. TX, he flew and came to see me and my family at Cresskill, NJ (when I taught and did research at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City).

In 1983, I visited Taiwan and gave a talk at the Scientific Meeting of the Chinese Medical Association in Taipei. After the meeting, I and Delphine met with Ting-Chi and Shu-Chen (淑慎) in Hsinchu, and we were shocked to learn a sudden unexpected demise of their eldest son. In one of the later visits, he took me to our alma mater and the surrounding areas and showed me how these areas had changed since our graduation. In 2008, Ting-Chi faced another shock that Shu-Chen passed away. I admire him for his great efforts to publish a series of linguistics books (20 in total) of Chinese, Japanese, English and Ho-lou language authored jointly by Ting-Chi and Shu-Chen, in the memory of Shu-Chen.

In April 2019, I had a last opportunity to see and to talk with him at Dr. Chen Te-Chuan’s (陳德全) condominium in Taipei (see photo). Ting-Chi talked vividly a great deal about various events during our high school days.

In short, Ting-Chi was not only a great and profound scholar of linguistics but also a warm and wonderful human being. I have been blessed to have him as one of my best friends for 75 years.

William Wei-Lien Chang, MD, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Pathology
West Virginia University
School of Medicine
Morgantown, WV 26506 USA



At Dr. Chen Te-Chuan’s condominium in April 2019.