Laurent Sagart (; born 1951) is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO – UMR 8563) unit of the

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 agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

(CNRS).

Biography

Born in Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the

University of Paris 7 Paris Diderot University, also known as Paris 7 (french: Université Paris Diderot), was a French university located in Paris, France. It was one of the inheritors of the historic University of Paris, which was split into 13 universities in 197 ...

and his ''

doctorat d'État Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...

'' in 1990 at University of Aix-Marseille 1. His early work focused on Chinese dialectology. He then turned his attention to

Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 ...

, attempting a reconstruction of Old Chinese that separated word roots and affixes. His recent work, in collaboration with

William H. Baxter William Hubbard Baxter III (born March 3, 1949) is an American linguistics, linguist specializing in the history of the Chinese language and best known for Baxter's transcription for Middle Chinese, his work on the reconstruction on Old Chinese. ...

, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds on earlier scholarship and in addition takes into account paleography, phonological distinctions in conservative Chinese dialects (Min, Waxiang) as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietnamese, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Tai-Kadai. A reconstruction of 4,000 Chinese characters has been published online. Their 2014 book has been awarded the Bloomfield prize of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

Sino-Austronesian

Sagart is known for his proposal of the Sino-Austronesian language family. He considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the

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. ...

, and also treats the Tai–Kadai languages as a sister group to the

Malayo-Polynesian languages The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 385.5 million speakers. The Malayo-Polynesian languages are spoken by the Austronesian peoples outside of Taiwan, in the island nations of Southeas ...

within the Austronesian language family.

Indo-European

Laurent Sagart also contributed to Indo-European studies. He co-authored a proposal that the ability to digest milk played an important role in the Indo-European expansion (Garnier et al. 2017), and took part in a controversy in French academia concerning Indo-European studies (Pellard et al. 2018).

Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family

Along with numerous researchers such as Valentin Thouzeau, Robin J. Ryder, Simon J. Greenhill, Johann-Mattis List,

Guillaume Jacques Guillaume Jacques (, b. 1979) is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families ...

and Yunfan Lai, Sagart conclude in a study published in the ''

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sc ...

'' that the Sino-Tibetan languages originated among millet farmers, located in Northern China, around 7,200 years ago.

Selected works

* * * * * * * Shā Jiā’ěr 沙加尔 aurent Sagartand Bái Yīpíng 白一平 illiam H. Baxter 2010. Shànggǔ Hànyǔ de N- hé m- qiánzhuì 上古汉语的 N- 和 m- 前缀. Hàn-Zàng yǔ xuébào 汉藏语学报 ournal of Sino-Tibetan Linguistics4. 62–69. * * * *

References

External links

CNRS homepage

Hyper Article en Ligne (HAL)

Laurent Sagart's Academia page

Laurent Sagart's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sagart, Laurent French sinologists Linguists of Southeast Asian languages University of Paris alumni University of Provence faculty Paleolinguists Linguists of Sino-Austronesian languages Linguists of Formosan languages 1951 births Living people University of Provence alumni Linguists of Kra–Dai languages Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages Linguists of Chinese French National Centre for Scientific Research scientists Historical linguists