Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Academia.edu uses cookies to personalize content, tailor ads and improve the user experience.
By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies.
To learn more, view our Privacy Policy.×
The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the ... more The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.
Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area
The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. ... more The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. Of an estimated 600 languages spoken here at Asia's heart, few are researched in depth and many virtually undocumented. Historical developments and relationships between the region's languages also remain poorly understood. This work brings together new work on under-researched Himalayan languages with investigations into the complexities of the area's linguistic history, offering original data and perspectives on the synchrony and diachrony of the Greater Himalayan Region. The volume arises from papers given and topics discussed at the 16th Himalayan Languages Symposium in London in 2010. Most papers focus on Tibeto-Burman languages. These include topics relating to individual - mostly small and endangered - languages, such as Tilung, Shumcho, Rengmitca, Yongning Na and Tshangla; comparative research on the Tibetic, East Bodish and Tamangic language groups; and several papers whose scope covers the whole language family. The remaining paper deals with the origins of Burushaski, whose genetic affiliation remains uncertain.
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their conta... more While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.
1. to accumulate the currently available information on Old Tibetan inscriptions, 2. to choose ma... more 1. to accumulate the currently available information on Old Tibetan inscriptions, 2. to choose major inscriptions among them and input the texts of these into an online database, and 3. to publish the result as a printed book.
A Structured Corpus of Old Burmese Stone Inscriptions
This dataset is a structured corpus of Old Burmese stone inscriptions, largely based on material ... more This dataset is a structured corpus of Old Burmese stone inscriptions, largely based on material from the dataset ရှေးဟောင်းမြန်မာကျောက်စာများ Ancient Burmese Inscriptions, with additional material by Thein Tun and Tilman Frasch.
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area, Nov 4, 2022
The use of ནས་ -nas to mark cross-clausal co-reference in Version I of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa r... more The use of ནས་ -nas to mark cross-clausal co-reference in Version I of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa reveals accusative alignment in Tibetan syntax, which in turn vindicates the notion of 'subject' applied to Tibetan. Already Hans Conon von der Gabelentz recognized Tibetan as an ergative language, writing that the "ausschliessende Gebrauch der passiven statt der activen Redeweise findet regelmässig bei allen Transitiven statt im Tibetanischen" (1861, 543). Bishop Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau even more clearly expresses Tibetan ergativity writing that "[n]ominativus qui facit actionem verbi habentis complementum, ceu nominativus instrumentalis aut agens" (Giraudeau 1916: iv, emphasis in original). Most work on Tibetan ergativity has focussed on the Lhasa dialect , Tournadre 1996), but there is also research on ergativity in Classical Tibetan , 280-284, Sato 1994). 1 Nonetheless, the existing research limits its scope to the description of morphological ergativity. Whether or not Tibetan is syntactically ergative or accusative (Dixon 1994: 143-181) appears not yet to have received attention. The goal of this essay is to show that Old Tibetan is syntactically accusative, i.e. with an S/A pivot (ibid., 171-175). 2 In order to ensure that we investigate a single linguistic system, the evidence examined here comes exclusively from Version I (mss. D + A) of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa (Jong 1989). 3 Although pedagogical grammars still fail to acknowledge the Tibetan system of co-and switch reference, this system has begun slowly to receive attention in specialized research , Zadoks 2002. The key to the co-and switch reference system is the use of ནས་ -nas to mark continuity of reference versus པ་དང་ -pa-daṅ to mark a change of reference. Example 1 gives a good feel for the Tibetan co-and switch reference system in action. 1 Vollmann (2008) provides a detailed historiographical account of Tibetan ergativity. 2 According to Dixon, other languages that are morphologically ergative but syntactically accusative include Watmajari, Hindi, Basque, Avar, and Enga (ibid.).
The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary seman... more The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary semantics and parallel syntax, provide a convenient window through which to caste light on the two forms of subordinate clauses that they both govern, namely infinitives and terminative verbal nouns.
The study of contemporary Tibetan literature is among the youngest and least developed domains wi... more The study of contemporary Tibetan literature is among the youngest and least developed domains within Tibetan studies. Although not the first publication dealing with contemporary Tibetan literature (cf., e.g., Venturino 2007), this volume will be remembered as the book that legitimized Tibetan literature. The book familiarizes the reader with the major figures and movements in Tibetan literature in the twentieth century. The historical focus is reflected in the overall structure of the work, which is divided into two parts, "Engaging Tradition" and "Negotiating Modernities. " The papers fall uncomfortably into these two categories: chapter 12 is a historical overview similar to chapter 3, but the two are put into different sections. Although all the essays are presented in English, four of the contributions (chapters 5, 6, 12, and 13) are translated from Tibetan. The inclusion of such translations adds enormously to the value of the work. In addition to the new contributions, the volume anthologizes important essays published elsewhere (chapters 3, 5, 6, 11, and 12). Most of the articles are schematic, outlining major themes such as Tibetan literature in the early twentieth century (chapter 1), poetry in Chinese by Tibetan authors (chapter 2), Tibetan magical realism (chapter 9), and Tibetan literature in the diaspora (chapter 13). Only
Few airline passengers meet the one word question 'Coffee?' with a baffled stare; the question cl... more Few airline passengers meet the one word question 'Coffee?' with a baffled stare; the question clearly means 'Would you like some coffee?' despite the absence of verbs and pronouns. Questions ask about the addressee or his ken and statements give information about the speaker or her ken. This pattern, which I shall call the 'conversational presumption', is built into the fabric of human communication; it permits languages even without verb agreement to make sparse use of pronouns. Witness Japanese genki desu ka (well COP Q) 'Are you well?' and genki desu (well COP) 'I am well'. 1 In particular, forms with inherently private evidential meaning (Wittgenstein's 'toothache') are restricted to first person statements (ha ga itai desu [tooth SBJ hurt COP] 'I have a toothache') and second person questions (ha ga itai desu ka [tooth SBJ hurt COP Q] 'Do you have a toothache?'); other contexts require different expressions (ha ga ita gatteiru [tooth SBJ hurt appear-PROG] 'He (you) appears (appear) to have a toothache'.). In a 1980 paper, Austin Hale mistook the intersection of the conversational presumption and personal evidentiality in Newar as an exotic form of person agreement, which he referred to as 'conjunct-disjunct' and, under the influence of Nicolas Tournadre's analysis of Lhasa Tibetan, later came to be called 'egophoricity' (Hill and Gawne 2017). I use the term 'Personal evidentiality' (equivalent to conjunct, egophoric, or participatory in descriptions of particular languages) for the marking of information as known through conscious personal involvement, e.g. 'I am a linguist', 'I work in London', etc. Since Hale's time linguists have struggled to overcome his error. The book under review is a step forward in this struggle, but the battle is far from won. Before Hale, Edward Bendix correctly described Newar personal evidentiality as expressing "the evidential category of intentional action" (Bendix 1974: 54) and emphasized it "is evidential and
Transactions of the Philological Society, Jul 13, 2010
Despite the importance of Old Tibetan in the Tibeto-Burman language family, little research has t... more Despite the importance of Old Tibetan in the Tibeto-Burman language family, little research has treated Old Tibetan synchronic phonology. This article gives a complete overview of the Old Tibetan phonemic system by associating sound values with the letters of the Tibetan alphabet and exploring the distribution of these sounds in syllable structure. 1 This generalisation is not true of Beyer (1992: 55-66), who does attempt to describe the phonology of Written Tibetan. However, he takes the letters of the script as being in a one-to-one relationship with the phonemes.
This dataset is a compilation of Chinese transcriptions of Buddhist terms produced by translators... more This dataset is a compilation of Chinese transcriptions of Buddhist terms produced by translators from the late Hàn period. It is a compilation of the previous works of Coblin (1983), for the Chinese transcriptions. To these were added phonological reconstructions of the Chinese terms for late Hàn from Schuessler (2009) and Middle Chinese from Baxter and Sagart (2014a), as well as the Gandhari equivalents of Sanskrit and Pali terms from . This dataset, shared on Zenodo, aims at being the new state-of-the-art dataset on Buddhist transcription material and can be used by anyone working on Hàn Chinese phonology and will help better understanding the possible language sources of the Chinese transcriptions, as well as the phonology of the target Chinese dialects.
The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary seman... more The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary semantics and parallel syntax, provide a convenient window through which to caste light on the two forms of subordinate clauses that they both govern, namely infinitives and terminative verbal nouns.
The prevailing internal reconstruction of the Classical Tibetan verbal system accounts for all ab... more The prevailing internal reconstruction of the Classical Tibetan verbal system accounts for all ablaut phenomena as innovations triggered by erstwhile segmental affixes. The traditional account cannot be correct, because the paradigms of nine verbs show -o- in the present stem without g- and a further three verbs show g- in the present without -o-. 1
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek list... more Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet http://dnb.dnb.de.
Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖
This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo ... more This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖. The coverage of of Ān Shìgāo complete, except for the two Kongōji manuscripts not included in the Taishō canon. The coverage of Lokakṣema is less systematic, including what is indexed by Karashima (2010) from the <em><em>Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā</em></em> and what was included in Coblin's (1983) study. Coblin, W. South (1983). <em>A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses</em>. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Karashima, Seishi (2010). <em>A glossary of Lokakṣema's translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramit</em>ā. (Bibliotheca philologica et philosophica buddhica 11). Tokyo : International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2010.
This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a we... more This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a web front-end originally designed to provide access to the Kaldi automatic speech recognition toolkit. The goal of this work is to make end-to-end speech recognition models available to language workers via a user-friendly graphical interface. Encouraging results are reported on (i) development of an ESPnet recipe for use in Elpis, with preliminary results on data sets previously used for training acoustic models with the Persephone toolkit along with a new data set that had not previously been used in speech recognition, and (ii) incorporating ESPnet into Elpis along with UI enhancements and a CUDA-supported Dockerfile.
The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the ... more The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.
Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area
The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. ... more The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. Of an estimated 600 languages spoken here at Asia's heart, few are researched in depth and many virtually undocumented. Historical developments and relationships between the region's languages also remain poorly understood. This work brings together new work on under-researched Himalayan languages with investigations into the complexities of the area's linguistic history, offering original data and perspectives on the synchrony and diachrony of the Greater Himalayan Region. The volume arises from papers given and topics discussed at the 16th Himalayan Languages Symposium in London in 2010. Most papers focus on Tibeto-Burman languages. These include topics relating to individual - mostly small and endangered - languages, such as Tilung, Shumcho, Rengmitca, Yongning Na and Tshangla; comparative research on the Tibetic, East Bodish and Tamangic language groups; and several papers whose scope covers the whole language family. The remaining paper deals with the origins of Burushaski, whose genetic affiliation remains uncertain.
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their conta... more While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.
1. to accumulate the currently available information on Old Tibetan inscriptions, 2. to choose ma... more 1. to accumulate the currently available information on Old Tibetan inscriptions, 2. to choose major inscriptions among them and input the texts of these into an online database, and 3. to publish the result as a printed book.
A Structured Corpus of Old Burmese Stone Inscriptions
This dataset is a structured corpus of Old Burmese stone inscriptions, largely based on material ... more This dataset is a structured corpus of Old Burmese stone inscriptions, largely based on material from the dataset ရှေးဟောင်းမြန်မာကျောက်စာများ Ancient Burmese Inscriptions, with additional material by Thein Tun and Tilman Frasch.
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area, Nov 4, 2022
The use of ནས་ -nas to mark cross-clausal co-reference in Version I of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa r... more The use of ནས་ -nas to mark cross-clausal co-reference in Version I of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa reveals accusative alignment in Tibetan syntax, which in turn vindicates the notion of 'subject' applied to Tibetan. Already Hans Conon von der Gabelentz recognized Tibetan as an ergative language, writing that the "ausschliessende Gebrauch der passiven statt der activen Redeweise findet regelmässig bei allen Transitiven statt im Tibetanischen" (1861, 543). Bishop Pierre-Philippe Giraudeau even more clearly expresses Tibetan ergativity writing that "[n]ominativus qui facit actionem verbi habentis complementum, ceu nominativus instrumentalis aut agens" (Giraudeau 1916: iv, emphasis in original). Most work on Tibetan ergativity has focussed on the Lhasa dialect , Tournadre 1996), but there is also research on ergativity in Classical Tibetan , 280-284, Sato 1994). 1 Nonetheless, the existing research limits its scope to the description of morphological ergativity. Whether or not Tibetan is syntactically ergative or accusative (Dixon 1994: 143-181) appears not yet to have received attention. The goal of this essay is to show that Old Tibetan is syntactically accusative, i.e. with an S/A pivot (ibid., 171-175). 2 In order to ensure that we investigate a single linguistic system, the evidence examined here comes exclusively from Version I (mss. D + A) of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa (Jong 1989). 3 Although pedagogical grammars still fail to acknowledge the Tibetan system of co-and switch reference, this system has begun slowly to receive attention in specialized research , Zadoks 2002. The key to the co-and switch reference system is the use of ནས་ -nas to mark continuity of reference versus པ་དང་ -pa-daṅ to mark a change of reference. Example 1 gives a good feel for the Tibetan co-and switch reference system in action. 1 Vollmann (2008) provides a detailed historiographical account of Tibetan ergativity. 2 According to Dixon, other languages that are morphologically ergative but syntactically accusative include Watmajari, Hindi, Basque, Avar, and Enga (ibid.).
The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary seman... more The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary semantics and parallel syntax, provide a convenient window through which to caste light on the two forms of subordinate clauses that they both govern, namely infinitives and terminative verbal nouns.
The study of contemporary Tibetan literature is among the youngest and least developed domains wi... more The study of contemporary Tibetan literature is among the youngest and least developed domains within Tibetan studies. Although not the first publication dealing with contemporary Tibetan literature (cf., e.g., Venturino 2007), this volume will be remembered as the book that legitimized Tibetan literature. The book familiarizes the reader with the major figures and movements in Tibetan literature in the twentieth century. The historical focus is reflected in the overall structure of the work, which is divided into two parts, "Engaging Tradition" and "Negotiating Modernities. " The papers fall uncomfortably into these two categories: chapter 12 is a historical overview similar to chapter 3, but the two are put into different sections. Although all the essays are presented in English, four of the contributions (chapters 5, 6, 12, and 13) are translated from Tibetan. The inclusion of such translations adds enormously to the value of the work. In addition to the new contributions, the volume anthologizes important essays published elsewhere (chapters 3, 5, 6, 11, and 12). Most of the articles are schematic, outlining major themes such as Tibetan literature in the early twentieth century (chapter 1), poetry in Chinese by Tibetan authors (chapter 2), Tibetan magical realism (chapter 9), and Tibetan literature in the diaspora (chapter 13). Only
Few airline passengers meet the one word question 'Coffee?' with a baffled stare; the question cl... more Few airline passengers meet the one word question 'Coffee?' with a baffled stare; the question clearly means 'Would you like some coffee?' despite the absence of verbs and pronouns. Questions ask about the addressee or his ken and statements give information about the speaker or her ken. This pattern, which I shall call the 'conversational presumption', is built into the fabric of human communication; it permits languages even without verb agreement to make sparse use of pronouns. Witness Japanese genki desu ka (well COP Q) 'Are you well?' and genki desu (well COP) 'I am well'. 1 In particular, forms with inherently private evidential meaning (Wittgenstein's 'toothache') are restricted to first person statements (ha ga itai desu [tooth SBJ hurt COP] 'I have a toothache') and second person questions (ha ga itai desu ka [tooth SBJ hurt COP Q] 'Do you have a toothache?'); other contexts require different expressions (ha ga ita gatteiru [tooth SBJ hurt appear-PROG] 'He (you) appears (appear) to have a toothache'.). In a 1980 paper, Austin Hale mistook the intersection of the conversational presumption and personal evidentiality in Newar as an exotic form of person agreement, which he referred to as 'conjunct-disjunct' and, under the influence of Nicolas Tournadre's analysis of Lhasa Tibetan, later came to be called 'egophoricity' (Hill and Gawne 2017). I use the term 'Personal evidentiality' (equivalent to conjunct, egophoric, or participatory in descriptions of particular languages) for the marking of information as known through conscious personal involvement, e.g. 'I am a linguist', 'I work in London', etc. Since Hale's time linguists have struggled to overcome his error. The book under review is a step forward in this struggle, but the battle is far from won. Before Hale, Edward Bendix correctly described Newar personal evidentiality as expressing "the evidential category of intentional action" (Bendix 1974: 54) and emphasized it "is evidential and
Transactions of the Philological Society, Jul 13, 2010
Despite the importance of Old Tibetan in the Tibeto-Burman language family, little research has t... more Despite the importance of Old Tibetan in the Tibeto-Burman language family, little research has treated Old Tibetan synchronic phonology. This article gives a complete overview of the Old Tibetan phonemic system by associating sound values with the letters of the Tibetan alphabet and exploring the distribution of these sounds in syllable structure. 1 This generalisation is not true of Beyer (1992: 55-66), who does attempt to describe the phonology of Written Tibetan. However, he takes the letters of the script as being in a one-to-one relationship with the phonemes.
This dataset is a compilation of Chinese transcriptions of Buddhist terms produced by translators... more This dataset is a compilation of Chinese transcriptions of Buddhist terms produced by translators from the late Hàn period. It is a compilation of the previous works of Coblin (1983), for the Chinese transcriptions. To these were added phonological reconstructions of the Chinese terms for late Hàn from Schuessler (2009) and Middle Chinese from Baxter and Sagart (2014a), as well as the Gandhari equivalents of Sanskrit and Pali terms from . This dataset, shared on Zenodo, aims at being the new state-of-the-art dataset on Buddhist transcription material and can be used by anyone working on Hàn Chinese phonology and will help better understanding the possible language sources of the Chinese transcriptions, as well as the phonology of the target Chinese dialects.
The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary seman... more The verbs གསོལ་ gsol 'request' and གནང་ gnaṅ 'agree, grant', because of their complementary semantics and parallel syntax, provide a convenient window through which to caste light on the two forms of subordinate clauses that they both govern, namely infinitives and terminative verbal nouns.
The prevailing internal reconstruction of the Classical Tibetan verbal system accounts for all ab... more The prevailing internal reconstruction of the Classical Tibetan verbal system accounts for all ablaut phenomena as innovations triggered by erstwhile segmental affixes. The traditional account cannot be correct, because the paradigms of nine verbs show -o- in the present stem without g- and a further three verbs show g- in the present without -o-. 1
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek list... more Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet http://dnb.dnb.de.
Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖
This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo ... more This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖. The coverage of of Ān Shìgāo complete, except for the two Kongōji manuscripts not included in the Taishō canon. The coverage of Lokakṣema is less systematic, including what is indexed by Karashima (2010) from the <em><em>Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā</em></em> and what was included in Coblin's (1983) study. Coblin, W. South (1983). <em>A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses</em>. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Karashima, Seishi (2010). <em>A glossary of Lokakṣema's translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramit</em>ā. (Bibliotheca philologica et philosophica buddhica 11). Tokyo : International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2010.
This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a we... more This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a web front-end originally designed to provide access to the Kaldi automatic speech recognition toolkit. The goal of this work is to make end-to-end speech recognition models available to language workers via a user-friendly graphical interface. Encouraging results are reported on (i) development of an ESPnet recipe for use in Elpis, with preliminary results on data sets previously used for training acoustic models with the Persephone toolkit along with a new data set that had not previously been used in speech recognition, and (ii) incorporating ESPnet into Elpis along with UI enhancements and a CUDA-supported Dockerfile.
Yearbook of Poznan Linguistic Meeting, Sep 13, 2017
The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics is growing in popularity. The increas... more The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics is growing in popularity. The increasing deployment of such methods draws into focus those areas in which they remain inadequate as well as those areas where classical approaches to language comparison are untransparent and inconsistent. In this paper we illustrate specific challenges which both computational and classical approaches encounter when studying SouthEast Asian languages. With the help of data from the Burmish language family we point to the challenges resulting from missing annotation standards and insufficient methods for analysis and we illustrate how to tackle these problems within a computer-assisted framework in which computational approaches are used to pre-analyse the data while linguists attend to the detailed analyses.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 7, 2023
This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Langua... more This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (STLS-2021) held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies on September 7-11, 2021: https://sinotibetan-japan.com/ stls/ We report on progress in interdisciplinary work using state-of-the-art technology for language documentation.
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past... more Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts, there are not many easy-to-use and fast approaches for the task of phonological reconstruction. Here we present a new framework that combines state-of-theart techniques for automated sequence comparison with novel techniques for phonetic alignment analysis and sound correspondence pattern detection to allow for the supervised reconstruction of word forms in ancestral languages. We test the method on a new dataset covering six groups from three different language families. The results show that our method yields promising results while at the same time being not only fast but also easy to apply and expand.
A LIFE IN TIBETAN STUDIES Festschrift for Dieter Schuh at the Occasion of his 80th Birthday, 2023
Bisherige Diskussionen zur tibetischen Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Präund Superskript... more Bisherige Diskussionen zur tibetischen Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Präund Superskriptkonsonanten. Tatsächlich kann der Gebrauch von Prä-und Superskripten ein unterschiedliches Sandhi-Verhalten aufweisen. Dieses Verhalten lässt sich in zwei Regeln zusammenfassen, in eine Präskriptlöschregel und eine Superskriptlöschregel. Nach der Präskriptlöschregel, fällt ein Präskriptkonsonant in der folgenden Silbe aus, wenn eine vorangehende Silbe in einem Konsonanten endet und die Superskriptlöschregel, wobei (1) wenn der Endkonsonant einer vorangehenden Silbe akut ist, und der Präskriptkonsonant des fraglichen Wortes gemäß der Präskriptlöschregel gelöscht würde, ein darauffolgendes Superskript ebenfalls gelöscht wird, und (2) im Anlaut auch das Superskript gelöscht wird, obwohl das Präskript bestehen bleibt.
International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, 2017
This chapter provides an overview of Tibetan lexicography, from the ninth century to today. While... more This chapter provides an overview of Tibetan lexicography, from the ninth century to today. While most Tibetan dictionaries were compiled in an ad hoc manner, some used citation collections. Electronic corpora have been built for Tibetan, but they have not as yet been used to assist dictionary compilation. The various obstacles that need to be overcome first in order to be able to compile corpus-based dictionaries are discussed.
Encylopedia of Chinese language and Linguistics, 2017
Walter Simon (1893-1981) was a Sinologist and Tibetologist who focussed on historical linguistics... more Walter Simon (1893-1981) was a Sinologist and Tibetologist who focussed on historical linguistics. His studies and the early part of his career he spent in Berlin, but following the rise of the Nazis he fled to England in 1936. From the year of his arrival until his retirement in 1960 Simon worked at SOAS, University of London. In the 1920s and 1930s Simon's research primarily focused on Old Chinese historical phonology and Sino-Tibetan comparison. In his study “Tibetisch-chinesische Wortgleiehungen” (1929) Simon notes the correspondence of Tibetan br- to Old Chinese *mr-, a correspondence now known as 'Simon's law'. During the 1940s and 1950s Simon produced many pedagogical works for the study of modern Chinese. Simon also contributed to the description of specific grammatical morphemes in Classical Chinese. Most of his later works are studies of Tibetan grammatical affixes and morphophonemic alternations in 'word families'.
Most researchers see Tibetan as a member of a language family which also includes Burmese and Chi... more Most researchers see Tibetan as a member of a language family which also includes Burmese and Chinese; this family is known by names including 'Tibeto-Burman', 'Sino-Tibetan', and 'Trans-Himalayan', of which the last is the most neutral and accurate (cf. van Driem 2012). In 650 Tibetan was reduced to writing as an administrative exigency of running the Old Tibetan empire; the earliest extant documents date from a century later (Hill 2010: 110-112). Tibetan linguistic history is conventionally divided between Old Tibetan (eleventh century and earlier) and Classical Tibetan (later texts). Tibetan boasts a vast literature with a wide variety of genres, and the family of Tibetic languages spoken today is comparable in size and diversity to the Romance languages (Tournadre 2008: 282-283). Lhasa Tibetan is the language spoken in the city of Lhasa, the cultural and historical centre of the Tibetan speaking area; this dialect is closely affiliated with the other Central Tibetic languages (Ü-kä, Dbus-skad). Different morphosyntactic processes are attested in Lhasa Tibetan, to express evaluative semantics.ii In addition to diminutive and intensive formations, Lhasa Tibetan also has honorifics, which express an evaluation by the speaker.
The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, 2014
ALTHOUGH there is a fairly wide consensus on the existence of a Sino-Tibetan family of languages,... more ALTHOUGH there is a fairly wide consensus on the existence of a Sino-Tibetan family of languages, there is considerable disagreement among scholars regarding its exact internal structure and the hierarchical relations between its members (Jacques forthcoming: " van Driem 20ll). Many languages in this family are furthermore not well documented or studied. This chapter will not attempt to address or take a stand on genetic affiliations, but will instead simply outline the derivational morphology of three representative Sino-Tibetan languages: Standard Chinese, standard written or Classical Tibetan, and Rgyalrong, a minority language spoken in Sichuan province, China. Perhaps the most high-profile Sino-Tibetan language besides Chinese and Tibetan is Burmese, the national language of Myanmar, which is, however, not treated in this volume. For detailed information on the morphology of Burmese, see Okell and Allott (2001). For recent overviews of the Sino· Tibetan family, see Thurgood and LaPolla (
In 1963 H. E. Richardson gained access, from Burmiok Athing, to photographic negatives of manuscr... more In 1963 H. E. Richardson gained access, from Burmiok Athing, to photographic negatives of manuscript copies of six Tibetan imperial period stone inscriptions, apparently collected by Ka: thog Rig ‘dzin Tshe dbang Nor bu (1698-1755).
Throughout Richardson’s subsequent publications on stelae he referred to these 6 transcriptions and employed them in his own editions of the inscriptions. However, the transcriptions have not previously been published, and thus many of Richardson's readings could not be verified by other scholars. Additionally, one of the transcriptions is the only extant evidence of a 9th-century inscription which is now too eroded to be read (‘Phyong rgyas bridge-head pillar). In late 2010 Richardson's photographic negatives of these manuscript transcriptions of stelae inscriptions were serendipitously discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library.
The photographs have been made available online in September 2011 at
http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/all/what/MS.+Or.+Richardson+47?sort=Shelfmark%2Csort_order
Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text. (A Festschrift for W. S. Coblin), 2014
Conrady, Li and others have noticed the Tibetan sound changes *ḫz > ḫdz and *ḫź > ḫǰ, but there i... more Conrady, Li and others have noticed the Tibetan sound changes *ḫz > ḫdz and *ḫź > ḫǰ, but there is also evidence for the changes *dz > z and *ǰ > ź (first noted by Schiefner). After presenting the evidence for *dz > z and *ǰ > ź respectively, this paper considers the other origins of ź, namely *lʲ and *rʲ. Finally, an attempt is made to establish the relative chronology of the changes proposed.
Imaeda Yoshiro and Mathew Kapstein, eds.. New Studies in the Old Tibetan Documents: Philology, History and Religion. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, pp. 3-38, 2011
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2023
This book tells the story of the tea industry in China and India during the 19th and early 20th c... more This book tells the story of the tea industry in China and India during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The overall story line is a zigzag movement in the prominence of the two regions. At the curtain’s open, India does not yet participate in commercial tea cultivation whereas China globally predominates. Next, the British introduce tea cultivation into Assam, directly copying Chinese production methods, partly with the help of Chinese experts. Around 1904 Indian tea exports surpass those of China. By the 1930s, it was the Chinese – the book particularly tracks the career of Wu Juenong – who were studying Assam in order to introduce new methods back home in China. Alongside the descriptive account of these changes and the technical production techniques and regimes of labour discipline that underpin them, the book attempts a two-part theoretical intervention on capitalism, arguing namely: (1) that capitalism was born global and embraces coercive labour regimes, i.e. free labour is not capitalism’s differentia specifica; and (2) that in both regions the ideological embrace or rejection of classical political economy by tea industry theorists arose from the vantage point on the world economy of the writer in question. Put differently, the infrastructural facts of the tea trade gave rise to the super- structure of tea’s ideologues. This materialist account of the reception of Smithian political economy in Asia is fascinating and original; to my mind it is the core of the work’s contribution.
Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální,
85 (2) : 305-315.
A revie... more Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální, 85 (2) : 305-315.
A review article of
Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.
Review of: William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxfor... more Review of: William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.) Archiv orientální 85.1 (2017): 135-140.
Tangut is among a handful of Trans-Himalayan languages with an early date of attestation and a va... more Tangut is among a handful of Trans-Himalayan languages with an early date of attestation and a vast literature. First recorded from 1042 C.E., Tangut is younger than Chinese (c. 1200 B.C.E) and Tibetan (650 C.E.), but older than Burmese (1113 C.E.). With the loss of the Tangut polity to the Mongols in 1227 C.E., the language gradually declined, with the most recent known text from 1499 C.E. The decipherment of Tangut became possible after Pyotr Kozlov excavated a sizable number of documents at Khara-Khoto in 1909 and transferred them to St Petersburg. The language and its literature are now reasonably well understood and actively researched. Nonetheless, the diachronic development of the language has garnered scant attention. The work under review treats the phonology and morphology of Tangut in comparative context. Jacques makes particular reference to Japhug Rgyalrong, a spoken language of our day. By any standard the methodological rigor and philological sophistication of this work is outstanding. The author has mastery over Tangut philology and its attendant secondary literature; written in French, the work consults research in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Tangut texts are cited at first hand and lucidly presented. In addition, Jacques brings his extensive fieldwork on Japhug Rgyalrong to bear throughout.
Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. xxxviii, 382 pp. $24.95, i... more Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. xxxviii, 382 pp. $24.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4277-9.
Proposing many new cognate sets and building on many decades of his own previous research, Matiso... more Proposing many new cognate sets and building on many decades of his own previous research, Matisoff (2003) represents a major contribution to Tibeto-Burman linguistics. Unfortunately, Matisoff's use of Tibetan is marred by errors of fact and analysis, which together undermine confidence in his reconstructions. * This review makes use of the Wylie transcription system with the exception that is transliterated as v rather than as an apostrophe. Citations from Matisoff (2003) follow his transliteration scheme, and as in the original are in bold type. I would like to thank Guillaume Jacques and Randy J. LaPolla for their helpful advice on a draft of this review.
In what appears to be the earliest observation on phonetic correspondences relating Tibetan and B... more In what appears to be the earliest observation on phonetic correspondences relating Tibetan and Burmese Anton Schiefner suggests that "Das Barmanische hat in manchen Fällen, wo das Tibetische das überständige sa gebraucht, einen aspirirten Consonanten im Anlaut" (Schiefner 1852: 340). Shafer repeats this suggestion (1940: 309). Both authors point to the comparison of Bur. nhā 'nose' to Tib. sna 'nose' as a clear example. Burmese aspirate consonants have two origins in proto-Burmish, namely plain voiceless and pre-glottalized voiceless consonants (Burling 1967: 6, 31-40, Mann 1998: 67-70; Nishi 1999: 68, 94-96). Consulting Lashi, which maintains pre-glottalized consonants in the widest variety of phonetic contexts (Nishi 1999: 70), one can distinguish those Burmese words that descend from plain voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. khre < *kriy 'foot', Lashi khjei) from those that descend from pre-glottalizated voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. -khre <*ˀkriy 'gall bladder', Lashi ˀkjeiH). Reformulating Schiefner's conjecture as a correspondence between Tibetan sC- clusters and proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants significantly reduces the number of apparent exceptions, but some still remain. In some cases Burmese fails to have the expected aspirated resonant anticipated from the s- in the Tibetan cognate (e.g. OBur. mruy, Atsi -mui³¹ 'snake', Tib. sbrul < *smrul [Simon's law]) and in other cases proto-Burmish has a pre-glottalized consonant although the Tibetan cognate has no s- initial cluster (e.g. Bur. ṅhāḥ < *ˀṅāḥ 'borrow', Tib. brña < *brṅʲa [Houghton's law]). In this talk I will examine the patterns, both regular and irregular, in order to evaluate the robustness of Schiefner's conjecture. To reveal one of my findings—within the exceptions there are cases where the Burmese development is apparently irregular, but the correspondence with proto-Burmish still holds (e.g. WBur. la 'moon', Lashi ˀlaX-, Tib. zla < *sla).
There is no tradition of named sound laws in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of thi... more There is no tradition of named sound laws in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of this tradition impedes progress. Attempting to bring this august practice into the Sino-Tibetan family, Hill (2010) presented an inventory of Tibetan sound laws. In this paper I present a similar list of sound changes for Burmese. However, whereas Hill's list was organized for the convenient of presentation, I present the list of Burmese changes in chronological order, charting the development of proto-Burmish to Old Burmese. The following changes, among others, will be presented.
Tibetan is among the earliest attested Trans-Himalayan languages and as such as had a paramount r... more Tibetan is among the earliest attested Trans-Himalayan languages and as such as had a paramount role in the reconstruction of the Ursprache. Nonetheless, in a number of ways Tibetan is phonologically innovative. This paper presents the most important Tibetan phonological innovations, updating the list given in Hill (2011) and focussing on those innovations that force a reformulation of some reconstructions. Particular sound laws to be outlined include *lʲ > ź- (Benedict's law), *rj- > rgy- (Li's law), *dz- > z- (Schiefner's law), and *-eŋ, *-ek > -iṅ, -ik (Dempsey's law).
This talk explores the contentious interpretations of the Tibetan letter 'འ' and its orthographic... more This talk explores the contentious interpretations of the Tibetan letter 'འ' and its orthographic and phonetic function, polemically engaging with Axel Schuessler's recent work on this question. While Schuessler views the usage of 'འ' as an orthographic convention without phonetic significant, this presentation argues for a historically motivated phonological significance of the letter's various uses. By drawing parallels with the capricious nature of the English 'h', we examine how both letters serve not merely as orthographic artifacts but as products of the history, including the phonological history of their respective languages.
About 10 years ago I compared various versions of the Nyatri tsenpo myth. For various reasons I a... more About 10 years ago I compared various versions of the Nyatri tsenpo myth. For various reasons I abandoned this project, but I found this summary of my findings and thought others might find it useful as an overview. All the findings are rather trivially verified yourself, so I am not sharing my disorganized notes that underpin these findings.
The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogram... more The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogrammarians. For at least six decades scholars have recognized the potential of transducers for improving the speed and rigor of research in historical linguists, but almost no historical linguists actually use them. This article identifies the obstacles facing the concrete use of transducers and introduces a software package built to reconstruct Proto-Burmish using transducers.
The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of around 500 languages, ranging geographically from fr... more The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of around 500 languages, ranging geographically from from Balti Tibetan in Pakistan to Hokkien Chinese in Indonesia, with the foothills of the Himalayas and the South East Asian highlands as its center of gravity. Van Driem (2001) and Thurgood (2017) provide helpful introductions to the family
Bisherige Diskussionen über die tibetische Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Prä-und Su-per... more Bisherige Diskussionen über die tibetische Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Prä-und Su-perskriptkonsonanten. Tatsächlich, kann das Gebauch von Prä-und Superskripten unterschiedliches Sandhi-Verhalten aufweisen. Dieses Benehmen lässt sich in zwei Regeln zusammenfassen, eine Prä-skriptlöschregel und eine Superskriptlöschregel. Nach der Präskriptlöschregel, wenn eine vorangehen-de Silbe in einem Konsonanten endet, ein Präskriptkonsonant in der folgenden Silbe ausfällt, und die Superskriptlöschregel, wobei (1) wenn der Endkonsonant einer vorangehenden Silbe akut ist, und der Präskriptkonsonant des fraglichen Wortes würde gemäss der Präskriptlöschregel gelöscht, ein darauf-folgendes Superkript ebenfalls gelöscht wird, und (2) im Anlaut wird auch das Superskript gelöscht, obwohl das Präskript bestehen bleibt.
This paper looks at the initials of Proto-Karen as reconstructed by A. G. Haudricourt in his thre... more This paper looks at the initials of Proto-Karen as reconstructed by A. G. Haudricourt in his three relevant papers.
This is the complete, and extensively revised version of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming boo... more This is the complete, and extensively revised version of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The idea is to clearly and empirically explain to non-Sinologists how Old Chinese (primarily in the system of Baxter and Sagart) is reconstructed. The comments I received previously on this chapter were extremely useful and testing the patience of the public, I would implore any additional commentaries.
This is the Burmese chapter of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burme... more This is the Burmese chapter of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. All comments and criticisms welcome.
This file is the Introduction and the first chapter (about Tibetan) of my forthcoming book on the... more This file is the Introduction and the first chapter (about Tibetan) of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. Any comments are welcome.
Most of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The i... more Most of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The idea is to clearly and empirically explain to non-Sinologists how Old Chinese (primarily in the system of Baxter and Sagart) is reconstructed. I have found it quite hard to write and think it contains factual mistakes, so any comments would be welcome.
Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society, 2017
Philological evidence and comparative phonology confirm the existence of an initial ry-in Old Bur... more Philological evidence and comparative phonology confirm the existence of an initial ry-in Old Burmese and Proto-Lolo-Burmese, evidence that is over looked in much scholarship (e.g. Matisoff 1979, 1991, etc.).
A set of four presentations that discuss a Tibetan corpus linguistics project based at SOAS Unive... more A set of four presentations that discuss a Tibetan corpus linguistics project based at SOAS University of London from 2012-2015.
Many of the world’s languages are unstudied and on the verge of disappearance. A few linguists st... more Many of the world’s languages are unstudied and on the verge of disappearance. A few linguists strive to address this problem, but compared to Indo-European languages, there is much more work to do, with only a fraction of the manpower and under immense time pressure. Over the last two decades the field of ‘documentary linguistics’ has attempted to address this situation, but with successes that can be said to be partial at best.
After considering some of the obstacles to language documentation, this talk takes a fresh look at the technical side of linguistic fieldwork. It does this from the perspective of recent technological innovations, and examines the workflows and approaches to data management in particular. I conduct two case studies, the methods through which, may hold great promise in helping communities that speak understudied languages, namely autocompletion software for mobile phones and the automatic phonetic transcription of spoken languages using neural networks.
This review critically assesses The Cambridge Economic History of China, Volume 1: to 1800, edite... more This review critically assesses The Cambridge Economic History of China, Volume 1: to 1800, edited by Debin Ma and Richard van Glahn, highlighting key issues in its coverage and approach. The book appears uncertain of its target audience, overburdening Sinologists with historical context while offering limited economic insight for readers less versed in China's history. Misguided comparisons to European economic thought, anachronistic terminology, and imprecise historical claims undermine the volume's credibility. Despite these flaws, the review acknowledges the contributions of well-executed chapters on agriculture and the environment, which reflect quality scholarship amidst a generally problematic compilation.
Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the availability of w... more Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the availability of written records. Since traditional language comparison within the framework of the comparative method is largely based on manual data comparison, requiring the meticulous sifting through dictionaries, word lists, and grammars, the framework is difficult to apply, especially in times where more and more data have become available in digital form. Unfortunately, it is not possible to simply automate the process of historical language comparison, not only because computational solutions lag behind human judgments in historical linguistics, but also because they lack the flexibility that would allow them to integrate various types of information from various kinds of sources. A more promising approach is to integrate computational and classical approaches within a computer-assisted framework, "neither completely computer-driven nor ignorant of the assistance computers afford" [1, p. 4]. In this paper, we will illustrate what we consider the current state of the art of computer-assisted language comparison by presenting a workflow that starts with raw data and leads up to a stage where sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages have been identified and can be readily presented, inspected, and discussed. We illustrate this workflow with the help of a newly prepared dataset on Hmong-Mien languages. Our illustration is accompanied by Python code and instructions on how to use additional web-based tools we developed so that users can apply our workflow for their own purposes.
This paper proposes the use of network techniques in the exploration of Old Chinese phonology as ... more This paper proposes the use of network techniques in the exploration of Old Chinese phonology as reflected in the phonophoric determinatives of xiéshēng 諧聲 characters. We use the approach to examine five specific proposals in Chinese historical phonology, and whether they can be said to be recoverable on the basis of phonophoric choice. The major finding is that the type A versus type B distinction is in some cases encoded in the choice of phonophoric, while other distinctions are only spuriously if at all reflected in the phonophoric subseries.
6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (STLS-2021), 2021
This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Langua... more This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (STLS-2021) held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies on September 7-11, 2021: https://sinotibetan-japan.com/stls/ We report on progress in interdisciplinary work using state-of-the-art technology for language documentation.
Uploads
Books by Nathan W. Hill
Papers by Nathan W. Hill
Throughout Richardson’s subsequent publications on stelae he referred to these 6 transcriptions and employed them in his own editions of the inscriptions. However, the transcriptions have not previously been published, and thus many of Richardson's readings could not be verified by other scholars. Additionally, one of the transcriptions is the only extant evidence of a 9th-century inscription which is now too eroded to be read (‘Phyong rgyas bridge-head pillar). In late 2010 Richardson's photographic negatives of these manuscript transcriptions of stelae inscriptions were serendipitously discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library.
The photographs have been made available online in September 2011 at
http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/all/what/MS.+Or.+Richardson+47?sort=Shelfmark%2Csort_order
85 (2) : 305-315.
A review article of
Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.
Burmese aspirate consonants have two origins in proto-Burmish, namely plain voiceless and pre-glottalized voiceless consonants (Burling 1967: 6, 31-40, Mann 1998: 67-70; Nishi 1999: 68, 94-96). Consulting Lashi, which maintains pre-glottalized consonants in the widest variety of phonetic contexts (Nishi 1999: 70), one can distinguish those Burmese words that descend from plain voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. khre < *kriy 'foot', Lashi khjei) from those that descend from pre-glottalizated voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. -khre <*ˀkriy 'gall bladder', Lashi ˀkjeiH).
Reformulating Schiefner's conjecture as a correspondence between Tibetan sC- clusters and proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants significantly reduces the number of apparent exceptions, but some still remain. In some cases Burmese fails to have the expected aspirated resonant anticipated from the s- in the Tibetan cognate (e.g. OBur. mruy, Atsi -mui³¹ 'snake', Tib. sbrul < *smrul [Simon's law]) and in other cases proto-Burmish has a pre-glottalized consonant although the Tibetan cognate has no s- initial cluster (e.g. Bur. ṅhāḥ < *ˀṅāḥ 'borrow', Tib. brña < *brṅʲa [Houghton's law]).
In this talk I will examine the patterns, both regular and irregular, in order to evaluate the robustness of Schiefner's conjecture. To reveal one of my findings—within the exceptions there are cases where the Burmese development is apparently irregular, but the correspondence with proto-Burmish still holds (e.g. WBur. la 'moon', Lashi ˀlaX-, Tib. zla < *sla).
Initials
Schiefner's conjecture, *sC > *ˀC
Burling's law, *ˀC > Ch
Matisoff's law: *ś-, *s- > s- and *č-, *ts- > ts-
Rimes
Shafer's law, -*ik> -ac, *-iŋ > -aññ
Maung Wun's law, *u>o₂ before velars
After considering some of the obstacles to language documentation, this talk takes a fresh look at the technical side of linguistic fieldwork. It does this from the perspective of recent technological innovations, and examines the workflows and approaches to data management in particular. I conduct two case studies, the methods through which, may hold great promise in helping communities that speak understudied languages, namely autocompletion software for mobile phones and the automatic phonetic transcription of spoken languages using neural networks.