André-Georges Haudricourt (; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996) was a French

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

and

linguist 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. Linguis ...

Biography

He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of

Picardy Picardy (; Picard and french: Picardie, , ) is a historical territory and a former administrative region of France. Since 1 January 2016, it has been part of the new region of Hauts-de-France. It is located in the northern part of France. Hi ...

. From his early childhood, he was curious about technology, plants and languages. After he obtained his

baccalauréat The ''baccalauréat'' (; ), often known in France colloquially as the ''bac'', is a French national academic qualification that students can obtain at the completion of their secondary education (at the end of the ''lycée'') by meeting certain ...

in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture ''(Institut national agronomique)'', in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the administration. However, at graduation (1931), Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group. Unlike his peers, he was interested not in promoting modern tools and technology but in understanding traditional technology, societies and languages. He attended lectures in

geography Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and ...

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

ethnology Ethnology (from the grc-gre, ἔθνος, meaning 'nation') is an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural anthropology, cultural, social anthropolo ...

and

genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...

in Paris.

Marcel Mauss Marcel Mauss (; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and a ...

obtained funding for him to go to

Leningrad Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

for one year to pursue studies in genetics with

Nikolai Vavilov Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov ( rus, Никола́й Ива́нович Вави́лов, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ vɐˈvʲiləf, a=Ru-Nikolay_Ivanovich_Vavilov.ogg; – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist a ...

, whose lectures he had attended with great interest at the National Institute of Agriculture. In 1940, Haudricourt was awarded a position in the new

Centre national de la recherche scientifique The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science Basic research, also called pure research o ...

, in its

botany Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek w ...

department, but he was disappointed by the research being done there, which relied on static classifications instead of an evolutionary approach espousing the new developments of

. In August 1940, the linguist Marcel Cohen entrusted to Haudricourt his library of books about linguistics before he joined the ''Résistance'', as he was afraid that the German occupation army would confiscate his library. That allowed Haudricourt to make extensive readings in linguistics during the Second World War. Meanwhile, he also studied

Asian languages A wide variety of languages are spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. The major language families include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Caucasian, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turk ...

at the

École nationale des langues orientales vivantes Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales ( en, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations), abbreviated as INALCO, is a French university specializing in the teaching of languages and cultures from the world. ...

. Haudricourt decided to switch from the botany department of CNRS to its linguistics department in 1945. In 1947, he presented a PhD dissertation (supervised by

André Martinet André Martinet (; Saint-Alban-des-Villards, 12 April 1908 – Châtenay-Malabry, 16 July 1999) was a French linguist, influential due to his work on structural linguistics. Life and work Martinet passed his ''agrégation'' in English and recei ...

) about

Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language fam ...

. The nonconformist thesis was not accepted by the two reviewers (

Albert Dauzat Albert Dauzat (; 4 July 1877 – 31 October 1955) was a French linguist specializing in toponymy and onomastics. Dauzat, a student of Jules Gilliéron, was a director of studies at the École des hautes études. Works * ''L'argot des poilus; di ...

and

Mario Roques Mario Roques (1 July 1875 – 8 March 1961) was a French scholar, professor of history of medieval literature and renowned Romance philologist. He translated and edited ''Le Roman de Renart''. Biography Mario Roques was born in Peru where his ...

) and so Haudricourt was not allowed to teach at the

École pratique des hautes études The École pratique des hautes études (), abbreviated EPHE, is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is highly selective, and counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions. It is a constituent college o ...

. Instead, Haudricourt volunteered to work at the

École française d'Extrême-Orient The French School of the Far East (french: École française d'Extrême-Orient, ), abbreviated EFEO, is an associated college of PSL University dedicated to the study of Asian societies. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in wh ...

Hanoi Hanoi or Ha Noi ( or ; vi, Hà Nội ) is the capital and second-largest city of Vietnam. It covers an area of . It consists of 12 urban districts, one district-leveled town and 17 rural districts. Located within the Red River Delta, Hanoi is ...

from 1948 to 1949. There, he was able to clarify issues in the historical phonology of

and to develop general models of

language change Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify ...

. He participated with other colleagues committed to the left (

Elena Cassin Elena Cassin, (1909 - June 2011), was an Italian-born French Assyriologist. Biography Elena Cassin studied the history of religions at the University of Rome and obtained her doctorate in 1933. She then went to Paris and attended Charles Fossey' ...

Maxime Rodinson Maxime Rodinson (26 January 1915 – 23 May 2004) was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife, who both were murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp. After study ...

Maurice Godelier Maurice Godelier (born February 28, 1934) is a French anthropologist who works as a Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one o ...

, Charles Malamoud,

Jean-Paul Brisson Jean-Paul Brisson (11 September 1918 – 25 June 2006) was a French honorary professor of Latin language and civilisation at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense. He devoted himself particularly to the social problems of antiquity, North ...

Jean Yoyotte Jean Yoyotte (4 August 1927 – 1 July 2009) was a French Egyptologist, Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France and director of research at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE). Biography Born in 1927 at Lyon, he attended th ...

, Jean Bottero) in a

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

think tank organised by

Jean-Pierre Vernant Jean-Pierre Vernant (; January 4, 1914 – January 9, 2007) was a French historian and anthropologist, specialist in ancient Greece. Influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Vernant developed a structuralist approach to Greek myth, tragedy, and ...

. This group took on an institutional form with the creation, in 1964, of the ''Centre des recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes'', which later became the ''Centre

Louis Gernet Louis Gernet (28 November 1882 – 29 January 1962) was a French philologist and sociologist. Life A student at the École Normale Supérieure (class of 1902), he received a licentiate in law and agrégation in grammar. In 1917, supported by ...

'', focusing more on the study of

ancient Greece Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...

. Within the

(CNRS), Haudricourt cofounded in 1976 a research centre whose goal is to investigate little-documented languages within their cultural environment, combining ethnological and linguistic work: the

LACITO LACITO (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'') is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition. LACITO is a branch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scie ...

research centre (''Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale'').

Work

Methodological contributions

Haudricourt is considered to be the founder of the panchronic program in historical phonology.

Tonogenesis

His study of the history of

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

and other East Asian languages draws on seminal insights. He clarified how a toneless language can become tonal. ''De l'origine des tons en vietnamien'' explains tonogenesis in Vietnamese and numerous other East and Southeast Asian languages and paved the way for the reconstruction of nontonal ancestors for the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, such as

Proto-Sino-Tibetan Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the common ancestor of all languages in it, most prominently the Chinese languages, the Tibetan language, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, ...

and

Proto-Tai Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language (common ancestor) of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly atteste ...

. A more comprehensive account of the development and evolution of tonal systems was published by Haudricourt in 1961.

Other contributions to the Reconstruction of Old Chinese

Haudricourt's main legacies to the field of reconstruction of Old Chinese historical phonology, apart from his systematic account of tonogenesis, are his reconstruction of final *-' as well as labiovelars. Haudricourt clarified several rhyming patterns found in the '' Book of Odes''. Words with final stops /-p -t -k/ rhyme with words in departing tone (去聲 qùshēng) according to their

Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...

pronunciation. For instance, words in the zhà 乍 and zuó 昨 series (Middle Chinese: *dzraeH and *dzak, respectively) rhyme, as do words in the bì 敝 and piē 瞥 series (Middle Chinese: *bjiejH and *phiet). That led Karlgren to reconstruct a voiced series of finals: /*-d/, /*-g/ and (in some cases) /*-b/. Haudricourt's theory, which states that the departing tone comes from *-s, explains that phenomenon. The words with departing tone rhyming with words in final stop should be reconstructed with final clusters *-ks, *-ts or *-ps. Moreover, from the point of view of historical morphology, Haudricourt's theory of tonogenesis leads to the reconstruction of several *-s suffixes (in particular a nominalizing suffix) which can be shown to be cognate with those found in conservative

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. ...

such as

Tibetan Tibetan may mean: * of, from, or related to Tibet * Tibetan people, an ethnic group * Tibetan language: ** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard ** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...

. A second major finding is his hypothesis that labiovelars existed in Old Chinese: "...it seems that scholars have overlooked the fact that some rhymes in the Analytic Dictionary only appear with velar initials (/k/, /kʰ/, /g/, /x/, and /ŋ/), for instance -iʷei C *-wej齊, -ʷâng -wang唐, -iʷäng -jweng清, -ʷâk -wak鐸, -iʷet -wet屑etc." (Middle Chinese reconstructions added in square brackets are from Baxter 1992.). The idea was used later to revise the reconstruction of the Old Chinese vowel system and is the basis for the six-vowel system common to recent systems.''Zhèngzhāng Shàngfāng'' 郑张尚芳, Shànggǔ Yīnxì 上古音系 'The Sound System of Old Chinese'' Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Jiàoyù 上海教育出版社, 2003.

References

External links

Linguistics articles by Haudricourt available in English translation (full-text, open-access)Bibliography of Haudricourt's works (open-access)
* A CNRS research centre named after Haudricourt

(homepage of

, a

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 ...

dept. co-founded by him; now part of centre André-Georges Haudricourt)
Two publications on Haudricourt
(2011, 2013) * *
A 1987 video interview of Haudricourt
on the topic of tone languages and rare phonemes. Excerpt from a 52’ documentary by Jean Arlaud and Pascal Dibie, produced by ''

La Sept La Sept was a French free-to-air television network and production company created on 23 February 1986 to develop cultural and educational programming for transmission via the TDF 1 satellite. In French, the word "sept" means the number seven; ...

''. *
André-Georges Haudricourt et ses élèves : leçon d’ethnobotanique dans les bois de Meudon 29 mai 1986
': documentary (40’) by Alain Epelboin and Annie Marx, SMM (

MNHN The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the ' (abbreviation MNHN), is the national natural history museum of France and a ' of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is loca ...

). {{DEFAULTSORT:Haudricourt, Andre-Georges Linguists of Southeast Asian languages Linguists from France 1911 births Scientists from Paris 1996 deaths 20th-century French botanists French anthropologists French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists 20th-century anthropologists 20th-century linguists Historical linguists Linguists of Hmong–Mien languages Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages Linguists of Austroasiatic languages