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, started in 1987 and lasted until 2015.
James Matisoff was the director of STEDT for nearly three decades.
The ''
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area'' journal, now published by
Benjamins Pub. Co., was also part of the STEDT project. In addition, the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL) were mostly organized by STEDT project members since the 1990s.
Overview
In 1987,
James Matisoff began th
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus(STEDT) project, which aimed to produce an
etymological dictionary of
Sino-Tibetan languages 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
cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymology, etymological ancestor in a proto-language, common parent language. Because language c ...
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 of the language family. The project was funded by the
National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Members
Project members were known as "STEDTniks," and included
Richard S. Cook,
Zev J. Handel,
Randy J. LaPolla, David Mortensen,
Jackson Tianshin Sun
Jackson T.-S. Sun, also known as Jackson Tianshin Sun (), is a Taiwanese linguist working on languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. He is best known for his pioneering documentation and historical-comparative work in Tani, Rgya ...
,
Jonathan P. Evans,
Weera Ostapirat,
Graham Thurgood,
David Solnit, Kenneth VanBik, John B. Lowe ("J.B. Lowe"), Liberty Lidz, Daniel Bruhn, Dominic Yu, among other linguists.
[
]
Publications
Preliminary results from the STEDT project were published in Matisoff's 2003 monograph ''Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction'' (HPTB).[Matisoff, James A. 2015]
''The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus''
Berkeley: University of California.
PDF
with an online version also available.[Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015). ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Database Software''. Software, UC Berkeley Dash. ]
Monographs
The STEDT Monograph Series, published by the STEDT project, has 10 books.
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*STEDT Monograph 1A: Randy J. LaPolla and John B. Lowe (eds.). ''Bibliography of the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics I-XXV''.
*STEDT Monograph 2: James A. Matisoff (ed.). ''Languages and Dialects of Tibeto-Burman''.
*STEDT Monograph 3: Ju Namkung (ed.).
Phonological Inventories of Tibeto-Burman Languages
'.
*STEDT Monograph 4: David Bradley.
Southern Lisu Dictionary
'.
*STEDT Monograph 5: Richard S. Cook. ''Classical Chinese Combinatorics: Derivation of the Book of Changes Hexagram Sequence''.
*STEDT Monograph 6: Paul K. Benedict. ''Kinship in Southeastern Asia''.
*STEDT Monograph 7: Helga So-Hartmann.
A Descriptive Grammar of Daai Chin
'.
*STEDT Monograph 8: Kenneth VanBik.
Proto-Kuki-Chin: A Reconstructed Ancestor of the Kuki-Chin Languages
'.
*STEDT Monograph 9: Richard Cook. ''The Eastern Han Chinese Grammaticon''.
*STEDT Monograph 10: Christopher Button.
Proto Northern Chin
'.
See also
* James Matisoff
* Proto-Tibeto-Burman language
* Himalayan Languages Project
References
External links
* {{Official website, https://stedt.berkeley.edu/
Etymological dictionaries
Linguistics databases
Sino-Tibetan languages
Works by James Matisoff