Gestern, 02:44
Frans Van Coetsem, Linda R. Waugh - Contributions to Sino Tibetan Studies (Cornell Linguistic Contributions, V. 5)
John McCoy, Timothy Light
English | 1986 | E. J. Brill | ISBN: 9004078509 | 485 pages | PDF | 81 MB
ISBN-13 : 978-9004078505
This volume on Sino-Tibetan studies is respectfully dedicated to our
teacher, colleague, and friend, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Nicho-
las Cleaveland Bodman. It will be clear to all who know him that the
contents of this book define in most appropriate fashion the linguistic and
geographic boundaries of Professor Bodman's prime research interests
over the past several decades. He has expressed these interests in his
close association from the beginning with the International Conference on
Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, in his courses on Sino-Tibetan
linguistics and Chinese linguistics given at Cornell University, and in his
research and publications. He has worked to make a more coherent unity
out of the extremely numerous and diverse materials that constitute the
Sino-Tibetan field. He has encouraged Sino-Tibetanists to go beyond the
Worter-und-Sacher phase and to deal with their field in a more holistic
and coherent manner, reminding us that the tenets of modern historical
linguistics require attention to families and related groups of words rather
than only to isolated individual correspondences which may not neces-
sarily demonstrate a genetic relationship.
Through his own work and that of several of his students, he has led a
rigorous reanalysis of the earlier forms of Chinese. This means that in the
Sino-Tibetan field, Chinese, with the oldest and most complete records,
has continually improved as a base for contrasts and comparisons.
Professor Bodman's own field work in modern Chinese dialects and
other Sino-Tibetan languages fostered an interest at Cornell in doing the
hunting and gathering of the field linguist, in collecting the living language
data that make up the building blocks of historical method. In the textual
reconstructions based on the Chinese rime books, in the linguistic recon-
structions based on dialect data, and in the comparative work in the non-
Chinese languages of our field, Professor Bodman's work has thus di-
rected attention to both the scope and the methodology of Sino-Tibetan
studies.
The papers collected in this volume are presented both as a greeting to
Professor Bodman and as a statement of the vigor and growth seen in
Sino-Tibetan studies in recent years. The authors here represent five who
studied under Professor Bodman and others who were drawn together
with him to the natural forum formed by the International Conference of
Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. This congruence of people and
ideas is a product of academic critical mass, a natural phenomenon whose
time had come. We hereby acknowledge Professor Bodman's role in
these developments.
The articles are separated by category and sequenced as follows: gener-
al compilation and analysis, South and Southeast Asian languages, early
recorded forms of Chinese, early reconstructed forms of Chinese, and
modern Chinese dialect descriptions.
We, the editors, wish to thank the various contributors for their efforts
and their patience as this volume came slowly to completion. Our edi-
torial goal was not in any way to make the papers uniform in style and
phrasing, but simply to work for a unified layout and a standardized
format for the bibliography. We are indebted to the Hull Memorial Pub-
lication Fund, the Provost, the Department of Asian Studies, the Depart-
ment of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and the China-Japan Pro-
gram, all of Cornell University, for the financial support necessary to
publish this collection.
We also wish to offer our sincere thanks to Sally Serafim, who provided
the final editing of the volume under great pressure at the last minute, and
to the staff of the Composing Room of Michigan, Inc., who managed the
production of this very complicated volume with good humor and an
extraordinary degree of accuracy.
THE EDITORS
John McCoy
Cornell University
Timothy Light
The Ohio State University
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