Read more
About the author
Professor Chingmuh Lee was born in 1941 in Taiwan. He was interested in a physics major but was persuaded to study medicine. In medicine, he pursued scientific research and attained a tenured professorship at age 39. Besides medicine, Dr. Lee pursued multiple interests, including hiking, music, horticulture, phonetics, and scientific fantasy. Dr. Lee holds a medical degree from the National Taiwan University. He completed an anesthesiology specialty residency from the University of Pittsburgh, and a research fellowship from the Harvard Medical School. He held faculty positions at Duke University and at UCLA. Since his retirement, Dr. Lee has published "A Gestalt Theory of the Universe and the Minds", and three books on the phonetics of Taiwanese. In a simple scientific study, Dr. Lee discovered that the entire Taiwanese phonetics is based on three pitches, dubbed do-re-mi, and that the ubiquitous "tone change" is simply a circular rotation. He also found that Taiwanese uses the sounds of ê and á in numerous grammatical functions, such as possessive cases, nicknames and past tenses. This work has laid out the phonetics of Taiwanese in its entirety based on physics, music and speech physiology. Dr. Lee is deeply concerned that Taiwanese, the prevalent language of Taiwan until the 1960s, has become endangered under political pressure. He prays that a language with such exquisite phonetic beauty will not perish.
