David Prager Branner 林德威

Computational Lexicographer of Chinese

What I do

These days I wear the following three hats:

• I use computational tools in the study of Chinese lexicography. My immediate goal is to significantly improve the quality of Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries.
• As adjunct Associate Professor, I teach Classical Chinese and Chinese Linguistics courses periodically at Columbia University, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures.
• I study in the Department of Computer Science, Grove School of Engineering, City College of New York.

Current research interests

Chinese Language Specialist: For my research on Chinese lexicography and historical linguistics of Chinese, please see my publications page.

Software Engineer: Source code and computational materials are posted at bitbucket.org/dpb rather than on this site.

My background

I received my doctorate in Chinese dialectology and historical phonology under Jerry Norman at the University of Washington and in college I studied linguistic field methods under Robert Austerlitz at Columbia University. Academically, my specialties have been dialect classification and fieldwork (especially in rural western Fujian), the intellectual history of Chinese linguistics, and phonology in the service of literature and paleography. I founded and led the Yuen Ren Society for the Promotion of Chinese Dialect Fieldwork from 1990 until 2003. I also ran the Seminar on Early China at Columbia University together with Li Feng from 2004 to 2011.

I have been a tenured professor (University of Maryland) and have held management positions in New York industry (machine translation) and the non-profit sector (study abroad, scholarly organizations).