The ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' (commonly abbreviated ''STEDT'') was a linguistics research project hosted at the

University of California at 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 univ ...

. The project, which focused on

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. ...

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 # ...

, started in 1987 and lasted until 2015.

James Matisoff 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 no ...

was the director of STEDT for nearly three decades. The ''

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 Sino ...

'' 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,

began th
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus
(STEDT) project, which aimed to produce 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 ...

Sino-Tibetan languages 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 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 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 unattest ...

of the language family. The project was funded by the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

(NSF) and the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

(NEH).

Members

Project members were known as "STEDTniks," and included Richard S. Cook, Zev J. Handel,

Randy J. 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 current ...

, 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 Jonathan may refer to: *Jonathan (name), a masculine given name Media *Jonathan (1970 film), ''Jonathan'' (1970 film), a German film directed by Hans W. Geißendörfer *Jonathan (2016 film), ''Jonathan'' (2016 film), a German film directed by ...

, Weera Ostapirat,

Graham Thurgood Graham Thurgood () is a retired professor of linguistics at California State University, Chico. Thurgood graduated with a Ph.D. in linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under James Matisoff. Thurgood's areas of ...

David Solnit David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...

, 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). In 2008, Matisoff published a monograph on Proto-Tibeto-Burman reconstructions for reproductive system vocabulary. The final release of the ''Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus'' was published in 2015 by Matisoff,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.
/ref> *STEDT Monograph 1A:

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 Paul King Benedict (; July 5, 1912 – July 21, 1997) was an American anthropologist, mental health professional, and linguist who specialized in languages of East and Southeast Asia. He is well known for his 1942 proposal of the Austro-Tai ...

. ''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
'.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://stedt.berkeley.edu/ Etymological dictionaries Linguistics databases Sino-Tibetan languages Works by James Matisoff