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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 ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...
of
Linguistics Linguistics is the 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. Ling ...
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 un ...
. 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 Mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula or Indochina, is the continental portion of Southeast Asia. It lies east of the Indian subcontinent and south of Mainland China and is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the west an ...
.


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 (Berezina), Svislach and the now subterranean Nyamiha, Niamiha rivers. As the capital, Minsk has a special administrative stat ...
,
Byelorussian SSR The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR, or Byelorussian SSR; be, Беларуская Савецкая Сацыялістычная Рэспубліка, Bielaruskaja Savieckaja Sacyjalistyčnaja Respublika; russian: Белор� ...
(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 Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later a scholar of
Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japanes ...
, 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 ...
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 un ...
, 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 electe ...
, 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 research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
and
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...
, 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 l ...
, 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 American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...
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 Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for th ...
,
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 Randy John LaPolla () is a professor and former Head of Division at thDivision of Linguistics and Multilingual Studiesin Nanyang Technological University. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected 2008. He is curren ...
, 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,
rhinoglottophilia In linguistics, rhinoglottophilia refers to the connection between laryngeal (glottal) and nasal articulations. The term was coined by James A. Matisoff in 1975. There is a connection between the acoustic production of laryngeals and nasals, a ...
,
Sinosphere The East Asian cultural sphere, also known as the Sinosphere, the Sinic world, the Sinitic world, the Chinese cultural sphere, the Chinese character sphere encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically ...
and
Indosphere Indosphere is a term coined by the linguist James Matisoff for areas of Indian linguistic and cultural influence in South Asia and Southeast Asia. It is commonly used in areal linguistics in contrast with Sinosphere. Influence The Tibeto-B ...
, ''
Cheshirisation In historical linguistics, transphonologization (also known as rephonologization or cheshirization, see below) is a type of sound change whereby a phonemic contrast that used to involve a certain feature X evolves in such a way that the contra ...
'', which refers to the trace remains of an otherwise disappeared sound in a word, and ''
sesquisyllabic Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as ...
'' 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 when classifying languages, Matisoff humorously coined the term ''columbicubiculomania'' (from '' columbi'' + '' cubiculo'' + ''
mania Mania, also known as manic syndrome, is a mental and behavioral disorder defined as a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or "a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together wi ...
''), which he defined as "a compulsion to stick things into pigeonholes, to leave nothing
unclassified Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to know, ...
."


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 Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
organized by semantic field. The project maintains
large, publicly accessible lexical database
of nearly one million records with data on Sino-Tibetan languages from over 500 sources. This database is used to identify and mark
cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...
s 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 In linguistics, rhinoglottophilia refers to the connection between laryngeal (glottal) and nasal articulations. The term was coined by James A. Matisoff in 1975. There is a connection between the acoustic production of laryngeals and nasals, a ...
: 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