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 at the
University of California, Berkeley. He is a noted authority on
Tibeto-Burman languages 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- most p ...
,
Massachusetts, to a working-class family of
Eastern European Jewish origins. His father, a fish seller, was an immigrant from a town near
Minsk,
Byelorussian SSR
The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR, or Byelorussian SSR; be, Беларуская Савецкая Сацыялістычная Рэспубліка, Bielaruskaja Savieckaja Sacyjalistyčnaja Respublika; russian: Белор� ...
(now
Belarus).
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 l ...
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 (1959). He then studied Japanese at
International Christian University from 1960 to 1961.
He did his doctoral studies in Linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley, where
Mary Haas, 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 and
Yale University, and through her own extensive research in descriptive and documentary linguistics had become a specialist in
Native American languages 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 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 rela ...
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. 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 (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, and
Uighur, among numerous others.
He edited the journal ''
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area'' 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,
rhinoglottophilia,
Sinosphere and
Indosphere, ''
Cheshirisation'', 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 languages.
In a 1990 paper criticizing
Joseph Greenberg's tendency to
lump 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
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, s ...
(STEDT) project, an
historical linguistics project aimed at producing an
etymological dictionary 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 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, s ...
''
*
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 b ...
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