Nathan Wayne Hill (born July 8, 1979) is an American historical linguist and

Tibetologist Tibetology () refers to the study of things related to Tibet, including its history, religion, language, culture, politics and the collection of Tibetan articles of historical, cultural and religious significance. The last may mean a collection of ...

specializing in languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, in particular

Tibetic languages The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries).Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptiv ...

. He is Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies and director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies at

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

. He was previously reader in Tibetan and historical linguistics at SOAS, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and served as head of department from 2017 to 2019. He is particularly well known for his work on comparative Sino-Tibetan,

Old Tibetan Old Tibetan refers to the period of Tibetan language reflected in documents from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century to works of the early 11th century. In 816 CE, during the reign of Sadnalegs, literary Tibetan ...

philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as th ...

, as well as linguistic typology (especially

mirativity In linguistics, mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind. Grammatical elements that encode th ...

and

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

). From 2014 to 2020, Hill was a principal investigator on ''Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State'', a project funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

. During the academic year 2015–2016 he was a visiting professor at the

University of California, 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 u ...

, and in 2020–2021 at Oxford's Oriental Institute.

Works

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References

External links

SOAS web page

Academia.edu profile

Google Scholar citations

'Why Does Tibetan Stack its Letters' (YouTube)

'Sino-Tibetan Languages Introduction and Historical Perspective' (YouTube)

'Current research themes in Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics' (YouTube)

'Methods in Sino-Tibetan linguistics' (YouTube)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hill, Nathan Linguists from the United States Tibetologists Living people 1979 births Harvard University alumni Historical linguists