Obituaries

Tsan Huang, assistant professor and coordinator of the Chinese Program in the Department of Linguistics, died last month in her native China after an extended illness.

Huang joined the UB faculty in 2003 as a visiting assistant professor teaching phonetics, Chinese language and Chinese culture; she was appointed an assistant professor and coordinator of the Chinese Program in 2004.

“Tsan’s dedication to the department, her students, and linguistics in the face of adversity was awe inspiring; her love of teaching, her relentless pursuit of knowledge, her mentoring of so many, her kindness and humanity, inspirational,” said Jean-Pierre Koenig, professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics. “Words cannot express the sadness we feel for having lost her.

“Our lives will be forever better for having known and worked with Tsan.”

A phonetician by training, Huang’s research interests included tone production — looking at the realization of lexical tones in connected speech — as well as lexical tone perception; specifically how tone perception can be influenced by the tonology of a listener’s native language.

Other interests included the segmental and tonal systems of modern Chinese dialects and how they may have developed from the Middle Chinese systems due to articulatory and perceptual constraints.

Most recently, she had been working on Oneida (Iroquoian) plosive voicing with Karin Michelson, professor of linguistics.

Huang was a member of the linguistics department’s Phonetics and Phonology Research Group, the Center for Cognitive Science and the Asian Studies Program.

She earned a BA in English language and literature from the Beijing Language Institute and an MA and PhD, both from The Ohio State University.