“My Fond Memories of Professor Stanley Starosta”

I first met Professor Stanley Starosta at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in the fall of 1967, when I started my Ph.D. program in linguistics.  I took the course Advanced Linguistic Analysis from him in the first semester.  He has been very kind and helpful to me although I was not a very great student in his class.  He was always patient to the students who did not get the points.  His comments on our manuscripts were extremely valuable and constructive.  If we could follow his suggestions and do a reasonably good job, we should be able to write up an acceptable paper.  I have not met any other instructor who would be so thorough in editorial notes on students’ manuscripts as he has done all these years.  I have greatly benefited from his advice and guidance ever since I came to know him.

I got into the field of Austronesian linguistics, partly due to his long time influence.  When I completed the first year course work at the University of Hawai‘i, I did not know what to do in the summer.  Stan told me that Professor Gary Parker was looking for someone interested in doing field work in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).  It turned out to be my first and most rewarding field experience in Melanesia in the summer of 1968.  In the second academic year, I sat in Professor Byron Bender's Seminar on Micronesian languages, and he recommended that I participate in the summer program in Ponape, Micronesia, sponsored by the Peace Corps, where I spent the summer of 1969, working with Kosrae informants.  Knowing that I had done some fieldwork in Oceania, Professor Fang Kuei Li strongly recommended that I take up a research position at the Academia Sinica in Taipei so that I could do more work on Formosan languages.  It turned out that Formosan linguistics has become my lifetime engagement.

As stated in my (Li 2000) article contributed to the festschrift in honor of Stanley Starosta, he ‘had worked on Formosan languages several years before I actually worked on these languages myself. He was adviser not only for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Hawai‘i (1973), but also for the many other papers I have published ever since.  He has contributed many great ideas to my writings all these years.  He deserves more credit than I have acknowledged.’  For one thing, when we went to the field to collect Rukai (Formosa) data together in 1972, it was such a rewarding experience that I learned a great deal from him how to elicit and sort out relevant syntactic data.  For another, he treated his student just like a friend.  For instance, he insisted that we take turns in taking a bath in the inconvenient field situation: If he was the first to take a bath the first evening, then he would insist that I be the first the next evening.  Whenever I came to Honolulu to attend a conference, he offered to pick me up at the airport and invited me to stay with him.  When we were leaving for a conference[1] in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in November 2000, he was staying at an international airport hotel in transit in Taipei, and he invited me to stay in the same room with him.  I could see that he was tired and needed more rest, yet he would do anything to make me feel comfortable.  He knew some friend in Ho Chi Minh City; when his friend invited him to dinner, I was also invited.  I could not have enjoyed the conference so much without his company.

Professor Starosta was invited to teach as a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University in the Spring semester of 1989.  We were able to do some field work on Saaroa, a Formosan language spoken in southern Taiwan, together during the semester.  A few years later, he was invited to teach at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, in Taipei.

When I first heard him speaking Mandarin and Taiwanese (a Southern Min variety of Chinese spoken in Taiwan), he struck me as if he had been a native speaker of both languages.  I understand that he also learned to speak Sora (India), Tsou (Formosa) and Thai; native speakers of these languages can confirm his native-like command of the languages even though he may not be fluent at all times, especially after a long period of disuse.

Stan was very considerate in many ways.  It was a great pleasure to have his company on all occasions.  When I had some good news to share with a good friend, he used to be the first I'd like to share it with me.  When I won the first Distinguished Research Award from the National Science Council, Republic of China, in 1987, I told him about the good news, and he passed it around to almost all the people who knew me in Honolulu.

Stan is both a great teacher and friend at the same time.  Most people who know him really like him very much.  It is tragic that he died at such a young age, only barely over 60.  It is hard for us to believe that he is no longer with us.  The last time he came to Taiwan was to attend a conference on Austronesian studies[2] in Taipei last December.  I was surprised to find that he looked much older than his age.  …  He did not behave like the normal Stan to me.  When we were crossing a street together, I was going to rush to catch the green light, but he had to walk slowly and said to me, ‘You go ahead. I'll join you a little later.’  He used to be very energetic.  So I was a little alarmed and worried.  I didn't know that he had heart trouble.  Probably even he himself did not know how serious it was.  That's why he promised to teach Formosan Syntax in a summer program in Taipei this year.  He was busy preparing for his lectures in June.  In early July he had to tell me that … it was unrealistic to believe that he could come and teach in Taipei this summer.  But he said that he would not give up his work on Formosan languages.  He also told me that he might have to retire early and that he would have more time for Formosan studies.  It's sad that even he himself did not know that his days were numbered.  I have lost both a great teacher and friend at the same time.”

Paul Li