Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology and

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 ...

. Bodman was born in Chicago in 1913. He entered

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1935, but left after one year and spent several years doing office work and traveling in Europe. He joined the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

in 1941, and was assigned to

Station HYPO Station , also known as Fleet Radio Unit Pacific () was the United States Navy signals monitoring and cryptographic intelligence unit in Hawaii during World War II. It was one of two major Allied signals intelligence units, called Fleet Radio U ...

Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor is an American lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. It was often visited by the Naval fleet of the United States, before it was acquired from the Hawaiian Kingdom by the U.S. with the signing of the ...

in early 1942 to join the team working to decipher Japanese naval codes. He retired from the navy in 1945 with the rank of

Lieutenant commander Lieutenant commander (also hyphenated lieutenant-commander and abbreviated Lt Cdr, LtCdr. or LCDR) is a commissioned officer rank in many navies. The rank is superior to a lieutenant and subordinate to a commander. The corresponding ran ...

. After leaving the navy, Bodman enrolled at

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., with a study of the phonology of the '' Shiming''. While at Yale he was a student of Li Fang-Kuei, who was a visiting professor there at the time. He worked at the Foreign Service Institute from 1950 until 1962, rising to head to the Department of Far Eastern languages. Between 1951 and 1952, he was in Malaya on loan to the British government, where he created a course on

Hokkien The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages ...

that is still a definitive reference. In 1962, Bodman joined the faculty of

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

, where he stayed until his retirement in 1979. He continued to do fieldwork on

Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people sp ...

and Min dialects. In an unpublished paper presented at Princeton in 1971, he proposed a novel six-vowel system for a stage of Chinese prior to the

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 12 ...

of the earliest records. This system was later developed as a proposal for Old Chinese itself by Bodman's student William Baxter, and independently by Sergei Starostin and Zhengzhang Shangfang, and is now widely accepted. He marshaled his ideas on Old Chinese and its relationship with Sino-Tibetan in an influential treatment published in 1980. Later he published a series of papers reconstructing the history of the Min group.

Publications

* * ** adapted with dialogues rewritten by Wu Su-chu as ''Spoken Taiwanese'', Spoken Language Services, 1983. . * *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bodman, Nicholas C. 1913 births 1997 deaths Yale College alumni American sinologists Cornell University faculty Linguists from the United States Writers from Chicago Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages Linguists of Chinese 20th-century linguists Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni