James Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor
Emeritus of
Linguistics
Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...
at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. He is a noted authority on
Tibeto-Burman languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people sp ...
and other languages of
mainland Southeast Asia.
Education
Matisoff was born July 14, 1937, in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
,
Massachusetts
Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...
, to a working-class family of
Eastern European Jewish origins. His father, a fish seller, was an immigrant from a town near
Minsk
Minsk ( be, Мінск ; russian: Минск) is the capital and the largest city of Belarus, located on the Svislach and the now subterranean Niamiha rivers. As the capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is the admi ...
,
Byelorussian SSR (now
Belarus
Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
).
He attended
Harvard from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later a scholar of
Japanese literature, when the two shared a Japanese class. He received two degrees from Harvard: an A.B. in
Romance
Romance (from Vulgar Latin , "in the Roman language", i.e., "Latin") may refer to:
Common meanings
* Romance (love), emotional attraction towards another person and the courtship behaviors undertaken to express the feelings
* Romance languages, ...
Languages and Literatures (1958) and an A.M. in
French Literature
French literature () generally speaking, is literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than F ...
(1959). He then studied Japanese at
International Christian University
is a non-denominational private university located in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, commonly known as ICU. With the efforts of Prince Takamatsu, General Douglas MacArthur, and BOJ President Hisato Ichimada, ICU was established in 1949 as the first l ...
from 1960 to 1961.
He did his doctoral studies in Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, where
Mary Haas
Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected ...
, co-founder of the department, was then chair. Haas had been a student of
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American Jewish anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
Sap ...
while at
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...
and
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
, and through her own extensive research in descriptive and documentary linguistics had become a specialist in
Native American languages
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
and an authority on
Thai. Haas was instrumental in Matisoff's decision to research a language of mainland Southeast Asia for his dissertation.
Matisoff's doctoral dissertation was a grammar of the
Lahu language
Lahu (autonym: ''Ladhof'' ) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Lahu people of China, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos. It is widely used in China, both by Lahu people, and by other ethnic minorities in Yunnan, who use it as a lingu ...
, a
Tibeto-Burman
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people spea ...
language belonging to the
Loloish
The Loloish languages, also known as Yi in China and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of fifty to a hundred Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in the Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to Burmese and its relat ...
branch of the family. He spent a year in northern Thailand doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies with support from a
Fulbright-Hays Fellowship
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
. He completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967, and made several field studies thereafter through an
American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. His ''Grammar of Lahu'' is notable both for its depth of detail and the theoretical eclecticism which informed his description of the language. He later published an extensive dictionary of Lahu (1988) and a correspondin
''English-Lahu lexicon''(2006).
Career
After four years teaching at
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
(1966–1969), Matisoff accepted a professorship at
Berkeley. At Berkeley, his research has encompassed a wide range of topics, from historical and comparative linguistics to tonal phenomena, variational semantics,
language contact,
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
, and Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax. Before his retirement, he taught classes on the Linguistics of Southeast Asia, Tibeto-Burman Linguistics, Historical Semantics, Morphology, and Field Methods. In Field Methods, graduate students learn the methods of language description through eliciting data from a native speaker. The languages studied in Matisoff’s field methods classes in different years include:
Lai Chin,
Sherpa Sherpa may refer to:
Ethnography
* Sherpa people, an ethnic group in north eastern Nepal
* Sherpa language
Organizations and companies
* Sherpa (association), a French network of jurists dedicated to promoting corporate social responsibility
* ...
, and
Uighur, among numerous others.
He edited the journal ''
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
''Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on the Sino-Tibetan languages and other mainland Southeast Asian languages. It was established in 1974 and was closely associated with the Sin ...
'' for many years (subsequently edited by his student
Randy LaPolla, then by LaPolla's student Alec Coupe). Matisoff participated in establishing th
International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics(abbreviated ICSTLL), an annual conference held since 1968.
Coined terms
Matisoff has coined a number of terms used in linguistics, including
tonogenesis
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
,
rhinoglottophilia,
Sinosphere and
Indosphere, ''
Cheshirisation'', which refers to the trace remains of an otherwise disappeared sound in a word, and ''
sesquisyllabic'' to describe the
iambic stress pattern of words in languages spoken in Southeast Asia, such as the
Mon–Khmer
The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...
languages.
In a 1990 paper criticizing
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
's tendency to
lump
Lump may refer to:
* "Lump" (song), a 1995 song by The Presidents of the United States of America
* ''Lump'' (compilation album), a 2000 best-of album by The Presidents of the United States of America
* Lump (dog), a dog who inspired Pablo Pica ...
when
classifying languages, Matisoff humorously coined the term ''columbicubiculomania'' (from ''
columbi'' + ''
cubiculo'' + ''
mania''), which he defined as "a compulsion to stick things into
pigeonholes, to leave nothing
unclassified."
STEDT
In 1987, Matisoff began the
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus
The ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (commonly abbreviated ''STEDT'') was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, st ...
(STEDT) project, an
historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
project aimed at producing an
etymological dictionary
An etymological dictionary discusses the etymology of the words listed. Often, large dictionaries, such as the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' and ''Webster's'', will contain some etymological information, without aspiring to focus on etymology.
E ...
of
Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field. The project maintains
large, publicly accessible lexical databaseof nearly one million records with data on Sino-Tibetan languages from over 500 sources. This database is used to identify and mark
cognates for the purposes of better understanding the historical development of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the subgroupings of the languages therein, and to reconstruct the theoretical
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattes ...
of the language family, Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Matisoff has authored two monographs so far presenting results from the STEDT project:
The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus' (2008) and
The Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman' (2003, 800 p.).
Although Matisoff retired from Berkeley in 2002, he continues to publish extensively and was Principal Investigator for the STEDT project until its end in 2015. In 2015, the final print and software releases for STEDT were disseminated to the public, concluding the decades-long ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (STEDT).
[Matisoff, James A. 2015]
''The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus''
Berkeley: University of California.
PDF
[Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015). ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Database Software''. Software, UC Berkeley Dash. ]
See also
*''
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus
The ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (commonly abbreviated ''STEDT'') was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, st ...
''
*
Proto-Tibeto-Burman language
Proto-Tibeto-Burman (commonly abbreviated PTB) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined ...
References
Bibliography
*
* Matisoff, J. (1972). "Lahu nominalization, relativization, and genitivization". John Kimball, (ed.), ''Syntax and Semantics,'' Vol. 1, 237-57. ''Studies in Language Series.'' New York: Seminar Press.
* Matisoff, J. (1972). ''The Loloish tonal split revisited''.
* Matisoff, J. (1973). "Tonogenesis in Southeast Asia". Larry M. Hyman, (ed.), ''Consonant Types and Tone,'' 71-95. ''Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics,'' No. 1. Los Angeles: UCLA.
* Matisoff, J. (1973). ''The grammar of Lahu'', 2 ed. 1982.
* Matisoff, J. (1975). "
Rhinoglottophilia: The mysterious connection between nasality and glottality". Charles Ferguson, Larry M. Hyman, and John Ohala, (eds.), ''Nasálfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization,'' 265-87. Stanford, California: Stanford University Language Universals Project.
* Matisoff, J. (1978). ''Variational semantics in Tibeto-Burman: The 'organic' approach to linguistic comparison''.
* Matisoff, J. (1979). ''Blessings, curses, hopes, and fears: Psycho-ostensive expressions in Yiddish'', 2 ed., 2000.
* Matisoff, J. (1988). ''The dictionary of Lahu''.
*
* Matisoff, J. (1991). "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." Elizabeth C. Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), ''Approaches to Grammaticalization'', 1991, Vol. II, 383–453.
*
* Matisoff, J. (1997). ''Sino-Tibetan Numeral Systems: prefixes, protoforms and problems'', 1997.
* Matisoff, J. (2003). ''Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction''.
* Matisoff, J. (2003). "Lahu". Graham Thurgood and Randy LaPolla, (eds.), ''The Sino-Tibetan Languages,'' 208-221. London and New York: Routledge.
* Matisoff, J. (2003). "Southeast Asian Languages". William Frawley and Bernard Comrie, (eds.), ''International Encyclopedia of Linguistics,'' 2nd Edition, Vol. IV, 126-130. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Matisoff, J. (2006).
English-Lahu Lexicon'' University of California Publications in Linguistics, Vol. 139. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
* Matisoff, J. (2008).
The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus'' With comments on Chinese comparanda by Zev J. Handel. University of California Publications in Linguistics, Vol 140. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
External links
Personal page at the STEDT project websiteFull list of publicationsSTEDT project page''The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus''''English-Lahu Lexicon''2017 interview at ICSTLL 50
{{DEFAULTSORT:Matisoff, James
1937 births
Living people
Linguists from the United States
Linguists of Southeast Asian languages
Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages
Harvard University alumni
University of California, Berkeley alumni
University of California, Berkeley faculty
Columbia University faculty
Neologists
Jewish American academics
Linguists of Yiddish
Historical linguists
American lexicographers
20th-century linguists
21st-century linguists
Linguists of Loloish languages