The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the ... more The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.
This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of
Tibetan languages. This incl... more This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. ... more The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. Of an estimated 600 languages spoken here at Asia's heart, few are researched in depth and many virtually undocumented. Historical developments and relationships between the region's languages also remain poorly understood. This work brings together new work on under-researched Himalayan languages with investigations into the complexities of the area's linguistic history, offering original data and perspectives on the synchrony and diachrony of the Greater Himalayan Region. The volume arises from papers given and topics discussed at the 16th Himalayan Languages Symposium in London in 2010. Most papers focus on Tibeto-Burman languages. These include topics relating to individual - mostly small and endangered - languages, such as Tilung, Shumcho, Rengmitca, Yongning Na and Tshangla; comparative research on the Tibetic, East Bodish and Tamangic language groups; and several papers whose scope covers the whole language family. The remaining paper deals with the origins of Burushaski, whose genetic affiliation remains uncertain.
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their conta... more While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.
This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo ... more This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖. The coverage of of Ān Shìgāo complete, except for the two Kongōji manuscripts not included in the Taishō canon. The coverage of Lokakṣema is less systematic, including what is indexed by Karashima (2010) from the <em><em>Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā</em></em> and what was included in Coblin's (1983) study. Coblin, W. South (1983). <em>A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses</em>. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Karashima, Seishi (2010). <em>A glossary of Lokakṣema's translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramit</em>ā. (Bibliotheca philologica et philosophica buddhica 11). Tokyo : International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2010.
This corpus is a part-of-speech tagged version of Wallman, Jeff, Rowinski, Zach, Ngawang Trinley,... more This corpus is a part-of-speech tagged version of Wallman, Jeff, Rowinski, Zach, Ngawang Trinley, Tomlinson, Chris, & Keutzer, Kurt. (2017). Collection of Tibetan etexts compiled by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.821218 using the training data of Hill, Nathan W., & Garrett, Edward. (2017). A part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus of Classical Tibetan [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.574878 Please note that the files are not post-processed or manually corrected and that a small number of files in the KarmaDelek directory were still annotated, although the original xml-input was corrupted already. using the memory based tagger of https://languagemachines.github.io/mbt/
Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly with... more Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly within the People’s Republic of China. In terms of publicly available tools for NLP, these languages and their scripts are extremely low-resourced and under-researched. We set out firstly to survey the state of NLP for these languages, and secondly to facilitate research by historians and policy analysts working on Tibetan newspapers. Their primary need is to be able to carry out Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Modern Tibetan, a script which has no word or sentence boundaries and for which no segmenters have been developed. Working on LightTag, an online tagger using character-based modelling, we were able to produce gold-standard training data for NER for use with Modern Tibetan.
Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly with... more Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly within the People’s Republic of China. In terms of publicly available tools for NLP, these languages and their scripts are extremely low-resourced and under-researched. We set out firstly to survey the state of NLP for these languages, and secondly to facilitate research by historians and policy analysts working on Tibetan newspapers. Their primary need is to be able to carry out Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Modern Tibetan, a script which has no word or sentence boundaries and for which no segmenters have been developed. Working on LightTag, an online tagger using character-based modelling, we were able to produce gold-standard training data for NER for use with Modern Tibetan.
The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the ... more The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.
This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of
Tibetan languages. This incl... more This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.
The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. ... more The Himalaya and surrounding regions are amongst the world's most linguistically diverse places. Of an estimated 600 languages spoken here at Asia's heart, few are researched in depth and many virtually undocumented. Historical developments and relationships between the region's languages also remain poorly understood. This work brings together new work on under-researched Himalayan languages with investigations into the complexities of the area's linguistic history, offering original data and perspectives on the synchrony and diachrony of the Greater Himalayan Region. The volume arises from papers given and topics discussed at the 16th Himalayan Languages Symposium in London in 2010. Most papers focus on Tibeto-Burman languages. These include topics relating to individual - mostly small and endangered - languages, such as Tilung, Shumcho, Rengmitca, Yongning Na and Tshangla; comparative research on the Tibetic, East Bodish and Tamangic language groups; and several papers whose scope covers the whole language family. The remaining paper deals with the origins of Burushaski, whose genetic affiliation remains uncertain.
While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their conta... more While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.
This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo ... more This dataset includes the Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖. The coverage of of Ān Shìgāo complete, except for the two Kongōji manuscripts not included in the Taishō canon. The coverage of Lokakṣema is less systematic, including what is indexed by Karashima (2010) from the <em><em>Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā</em></em> and what was included in Coblin's (1983) study. Coblin, W. South (1983). <em>A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses</em>. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Karashima, Seishi (2010). <em>A glossary of Lokakṣema's translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramit</em>ā. (Bibliotheca philologica et philosophica buddhica 11). Tokyo : International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2010.
This corpus is a part-of-speech tagged version of Wallman, Jeff, Rowinski, Zach, Ngawang Trinley,... more This corpus is a part-of-speech tagged version of Wallman, Jeff, Rowinski, Zach, Ngawang Trinley, Tomlinson, Chris, & Keutzer, Kurt. (2017). Collection of Tibetan etexts compiled by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.821218 using the training data of Hill, Nathan W., & Garrett, Edward. (2017). A part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus of Classical Tibetan [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.574878 Please note that the files are not post-processed or manually corrected and that a small number of files in the KarmaDelek directory were still annotated, although the original xml-input was corrupted already. using the memory based tagger of https://languagemachines.github.io/mbt/
Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly with... more Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly within the People’s Republic of China. In terms of publicly available tools for NLP, these languages and their scripts are extremely low-resourced and under-researched. We set out firstly to survey the state of NLP for these languages, and secondly to facilitate research by historians and policy analysts working on Tibetan newspapers. Their primary need is to be able to carry out Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Modern Tibetan, a script which has no word or sentence boundaries and for which no segmenters have been developed. Working on LightTag, an online tagger using character-based modelling, we were able to produce gold-standard training data for NER for use with Modern Tibetan.
Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly with... more Modern Tibetan and Vertical (Traditional) Mongolian are scripts used by c.11m people, mostly within the People’s Republic of China. In terms of publicly available tools for NLP, these languages and their scripts are extremely low-resourced and under-researched. We set out firstly to survey the state of NLP for these languages, and secondly to facilitate research by historians and policy analysts working on Tibetan newspapers. Their primary need is to be able to carry out Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Modern Tibetan, a script which has no word or sentence boundaries and for which no segmenters have been developed. Working on LightTag, an online tagger using character-based modelling, we were able to produce gold-standard training data for NER for use with Modern Tibetan.
The replies to Fellner and Hill (this volume) present the practice of historical linguistics in t... more The replies to Fellner and Hill (this volume) present the practice of historical linguistics in the study of the Trans-Himalayan family as on the trail our Indo-European forbears blazed. The replies further present “word families” and “allofams” as beacons that light this path; we disagree. Our respondents overlook the different status of reconstructions in the two families. Research at the subgroup level that they point to as Neogrammarian implements a formalist approach to reconstruction, which, fine as far as it goes, lacks the sophistication of reconstructions in more mature disciplines. Not appreciating the different status of reconstruction in the two families, our respondents exaggerate the extent to which Indo-European evinces “word family”-like phenomena and present allofams as more synchronically plausible than they are.
This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This incl... more This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective
This study presents a dataset serving as a benchmark for the recognition of printed text in lexic... more This study presents a dataset serving as a benchmark for the recognition of printed text in lexical lists using Chinese-IPA glossing. The paper provides an overview of the baseline model, transcription model, and PyLaia engines employed in the research. Furthermore, it elucidates the specific need for digitizing the aforementioned lexical lists, outlines the methodology employed for training the baseline model for layout analysis, and describes the training process of the transcription model using the ground truth data generated on Transkribus. This comprehensive approach encompasses both the images of the lexical list content and their corresponding transcriptions as input. Additionally, the study highlights the limitations of the model and identifies avenues for future development. By making this dataset openly accessible, it can be utilized by researchers seeking to digitize lexical lists using Chinese-IPA glossing. Moreover, since the model can recognize both Chinese characters and IPA symbols, it has the potential to contribute to linguistic analysis of languages documented in Chinese-IPA glossing.
The popularity of computational methods in historical linguistics has primarily been motivated by... more The popularity of computational methods in historical linguistics has primarily been motivated by mere access to the new methods themselves, rather than by looking for tools to solve problems. Investigators have looked for problems with which to showcase their tools. This dynamic is one reason why eye‐catching but long solved problems, such as the homeland of the Indo‐Europeans (Gray & Atkinson 2003) have received more attention than genuinely unsolved or controversial questions, such as how to incorporate the Hittite ḫi‐conjugation into an understanding of the Indo‐European verbal system (Jasanoff 2003). One assumption of Bayesian methods is that cognacy can be conceptualized as binary. Although this is how historical linguists themselves often speak, it is not how they work. The goal of this essay is to more precisely delimit what is meant when we call two words cognate, to emphasize that this is not a binary relation, but to suggest that this relationship can still be modeled for...
Hill (2019a) compares Tib. mkhan 'know' with Chi. kenH 'see' as evidence for the antiquity of abl... more Hill (2019a) compares Tib. mkhan 'know' with Chi. kenH 'see' as evidence for the antiquity of ablaut in the Sino-Tibetan verbal system. Jacques (2020) raises objections to this comparison, which this article aims to answer. The proposed solution is that-e-grade and palatalization typical of Tibetan honorifi cs continue inherited present stems and that unpalatalized present-e-grades are of an analogical origin.
In noting that the Tibetan grammatical tradition lacks a notion corresponding to the ‘subject’ of... more In noting that the Tibetan grammatical tradition lacks a notion corresponding to the ‘subject’ of Occidental grammar, Tournadre remarks that this is appropriate, since the notion of the subject “est particulièrement inadéquat pour décrire la structure de leur langue” (1996, 74). Nonetheless, by treating the sole arguments of intransitive clauses and the agents of transitive clauses alike, the converb ནས་ -nas vindicates the use of the term ‘subject’ in this part of Tibetan grammar (Hill 2022). Although the pattern in which ནས་ -nas marks cross-clausal subject continuity appears robust, there are examples that seem to contradict this hypothesis. This article attempts to account for these exceptions.
A LIFE IN TIBETAN STUDIES Festschrift for Dieter Schuh at the Occasion of his 80th Birthday, 2023
Bisherige Diskussionen zur tibetischen Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Präund Superskript... more Bisherige Diskussionen zur tibetischen Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Präund Superskriptkonsonanten. Tatsächlich kann der Gebrauch von Prä-und Superskripten ein unterschiedliches Sandhi-Verhalten aufweisen. Dieses Verhalten lässt sich in zwei Regeln zusammenfassen, in eine Präskriptlöschregel und eine Superskriptlöschregel. Nach der Präskriptlöschregel, fällt ein Präskriptkonsonant in der folgenden Silbe aus, wenn eine vorangehende Silbe in einem Konsonanten endet und die Superskriptlöschregel, wobei (1) wenn der Endkonsonant einer vorangehenden Silbe akut ist, und der Präskriptkonsonant des fraglichen Wortes gemäß der Präskriptlöschregel gelöscht würde, ein darauffolgendes Superskript ebenfalls gelöscht wird, und (2) im Anlaut auch das Superskript gelöscht wird, obwohl das Präskript bestehen bleibt.
International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, 2017
This chapter provides an overview of Tibetan lexicography, from the ninth century to today. While... more This chapter provides an overview of Tibetan lexicography, from the ninth century to today. While most Tibetan dictionaries were compiled in an ad hoc manner, some used citation collections. Electronic corpora have been built for Tibetan, but they have not as yet been used to assist dictionary compilation. The various obstacles that need to be overcome first in order to be able to compile corpus-based dictionaries are discussed.
Encylopedia of Chinese language and Linguistics, 2017
Walter Simon (1893-1981) was a Sinologist and Tibetologist who focussed on historical linguistics... more Walter Simon (1893-1981) was a Sinologist and Tibetologist who focussed on historical linguistics. His studies and the early part of his career he spent in Berlin, but following the rise of the Nazis he fled to England in 1936. From the year of his arrival until his retirement in 1960 Simon worked at SOAS, University of London. In the 1920s and 1930s Simon's research primarily focused on Old Chinese historical phonology and Sino-Tibetan comparison. In his study “Tibetisch-chinesische Wortgleiehungen” (1929) Simon notes the correspondence of Tibetan br- to Old Chinese *mr-, a correspondence now known as 'Simon's law'. During the 1940s and 1950s Simon produced many pedagogical works for the study of modern Chinese. Simon also contributed to the description of specific grammatical morphemes in Classical Chinese. Most of his later works are studies of Tibetan grammatical affixes and morphophonemic alternations in 'word families'.
Most researchers see Tibetan as a member of a language family which also includes Burmese and Chi... more Most researchers see Tibetan as a member of a language family which also includes Burmese and Chinese; this family is known by names including 'Tibeto-Burman', 'Sino-Tibetan', and 'Trans-Himalayan', of which the last is the most neutral and accurate (cf. van Driem 2012). In 650 Tibetan was reduced to writing as an administrative exigency of running the Old Tibetan empire; the earliest extant documents date from a century later (Hill 2010: 110-112). Tibetan linguistic history is conventionally divided between Old Tibetan (eleventh century and earlier) and Classical Tibetan (later texts). Tibetan boasts a vast literature with a wide variety of genres, and the family of Tibetic languages spoken today is comparable in size and diversity to the Romance languages (Tournadre 2008: 282-283). Lhasa Tibetan is the language spoken in the city of Lhasa, the cultural and historical centre of the Tibetan speaking area; this dialect is closely affiliated with the other Central Tibetic languages (Ü-kä, Dbus-skad). Different morphosyntactic processes are attested in Lhasa Tibetan, to express evaluative semantics.ii In addition to diminutive and intensive formations, Lhasa Tibetan also has honorifics, which express an evaluation by the speaker.
In 1963 H. E. Richardson gained access, from Burmiok Athing, to photographic negatives of manuscr... more In 1963 H. E. Richardson gained access, from Burmiok Athing, to photographic negatives of manuscript copies of six Tibetan imperial period stone inscriptions, apparently collected by Ka: thog Rig ‘dzin Tshe dbang Nor bu (1698-1755).
Throughout Richardson’s subsequent publications on stelae he referred to these 6 transcriptions and employed them in his own editions of the inscriptions. However, the transcriptions have not previously been published, and thus many of Richardson's readings could not be verified by other scholars. Additionally, one of the transcriptions is the only extant evidence of a 9th-century inscription which is now too eroded to be read (‘Phyong rgyas bridge-head pillar). In late 2010 Richardson's photographic negatives of these manuscript transcriptions of stelae inscriptions were serendipitously discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library.
The photographs have been made available online in September 2011 at
http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/all/what/MS.+Or.+Richardson+47?sort=Shelfmark%2Csort_order
Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text. (A Festschrift for W. S. Coblin), 2014
Conrady, Li and others have noticed the Tibetan sound changes *ḫz > ḫdz and *ḫź > ḫǰ, but there i... more Conrady, Li and others have noticed the Tibetan sound changes *ḫz > ḫdz and *ḫź > ḫǰ, but there is also evidence for the changes *dz > z and *ǰ > ź (first noted by Schiefner). After presenting the evidence for *dz > z and *ǰ > ź respectively, this paper considers the other origins of ź, namely *lʲ and *rʲ. Finally, an attempt is made to establish the relative chronology of the changes proposed.
Imaeda Yoshiro and Mathew Kapstein, eds.. New Studies in the Old Tibetan Documents: Philology, History and Religion. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, pp. 3-38, 2011
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2023
This book tells the story of the tea industry in China and India during the 19th and early 20th c... more This book tells the story of the tea industry in China and India during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The overall story line is a zigzag movement in the prominence of the two regions. At the curtain’s open, India does not yet participate in commercial tea cultivation whereas China globally predominates. Next, the British introduce tea cultivation into Assam, directly copying Chinese production methods, partly with the help of Chinese experts. Around 1904 Indian tea exports surpass those of China. By the 1930s, it was the Chinese – the book particularly tracks the career of Wu Juenong – who were studying Assam in order to introduce new methods back home in China. Alongside the descriptive account of these changes and the technical production techniques and regimes of labour discipline that underpin them, the book attempts a two-part theoretical intervention on capitalism, arguing namely: (1) that capitalism was born global and embraces coercive labour regimes, i.e. free labour is not capitalism’s differentia specifica; and (2) that in both regions the ideological embrace or rejection of classical political economy by tea industry theorists arose from the vantage point on the world economy of the writer in question. Put differently, the infrastructural facts of the tea trade gave rise to the super- structure of tea’s ideologues. This materialist account of the reception of Smithian political economy in Asia is fascinating and original; to my mind it is the core of the work’s contribution.
Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální,
85 (2) : 305-315.
A revie... more Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální, 85 (2) : 305-315.
A review article of
Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.
Review of: William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxfor... more Review of: William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.) Archiv orientální 85.1 (2017): 135-140.
Tangut is among a handful of Trans-Himalayan languages with an early date of attestation and a va... more Tangut is among a handful of Trans-Himalayan languages with an early date of attestation and a vast literature. First recorded from 1042 C.E., Tangut is younger than Chinese (c. 1200 B.C.E) and Tibetan (650 C.E.), but older than Burmese (1113 C.E.). With the loss of the Tangut polity to the Mongols in 1227 C.E., the language gradually declined, with the most recent known text from 1499 C.E. The decipherment of Tangut became possible after Pyotr Kozlov excavated a sizable number of documents at Khara-Khoto in 1909 and transferred them to St Petersburg. The language and its literature are now reasonably well understood and actively researched. Nonetheless, the diachronic development of the language has garnered scant attention. The work under review treats the phonology and morphology of Tangut in comparative context. Jacques makes particular reference to Japhug Rgyalrong, a spoken language of our day. By any standard the methodological rigor and philological sophistication of this work is outstanding. The author has mastery over Tangut philology and its attendant secondary literature; written in French, the work consults research in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Tangut texts are cited at first hand and lucidly presented. In addition, Jacques brings his extensive fieldwork on Japhug Rgyalrong to bear throughout.
In what appears to be the earliest observation on phonetic correspondences relating Tibetan and B... more In what appears to be the earliest observation on phonetic correspondences relating Tibetan and Burmese Anton Schiefner suggests that "Das Barmanische hat in manchen Fällen, wo das Tibetische das überständige sa gebraucht, einen aspirirten Consonanten im Anlaut" (Schiefner 1852: 340). Shafer repeats this suggestion (1940: 309). Both authors point to the comparison of Bur. nhā 'nose' to Tib. sna 'nose' as a clear example. Burmese aspirate consonants have two origins in proto-Burmish, namely plain voiceless and pre-glottalized voiceless consonants (Burling 1967: 6, 31-40, Mann 1998: 67-70; Nishi 1999: 68, 94-96). Consulting Lashi, which maintains pre-glottalized consonants in the widest variety of phonetic contexts (Nishi 1999: 70), one can distinguish those Burmese words that descend from plain voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. khre < *kriy 'foot', Lashi khjei) from those that descend from pre-glottalizated voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. -khre <*ˀkriy 'gall bladder', Lashi ˀkjeiH). Reformulating Schiefner's conjecture as a correspondence between Tibetan sC- clusters and proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants significantly reduces the number of apparent exceptions, but some still remain. In some cases Burmese fails to have the expected aspirated resonant anticipated from the s- in the Tibetan cognate (e.g. OBur. mruy, Atsi -mui³¹ 'snake', Tib. sbrul < *smrul [Simon's law]) and in other cases proto-Burmish has a pre-glottalized consonant although the Tibetan cognate has no s- initial cluster (e.g. Bur. ṅhāḥ < *ˀṅāḥ 'borrow', Tib. brña < *brṅʲa [Houghton's law]). In this talk I will examine the patterns, both regular and irregular, in order to evaluate the robustness of Schiefner's conjecture. To reveal one of my findings—within the exceptions there are cases where the Burmese development is apparently irregular, but the correspondence with proto-Burmish still holds (e.g. WBur. la 'moon', Lashi ˀlaX-, Tib. zla < *sla).
There is no tradition of named sound laws in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of thi... more There is no tradition of named sound laws in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of this tradition impedes progress. Attempting to bring this august practice into the Sino-Tibetan family, Hill (2010) presented an inventory of Tibetan sound laws. In this paper I present a similar list of sound changes for Burmese. However, whereas Hill's list was organized for the convenient of presentation, I present the list of Burmese changes in chronological order, charting the development of proto-Burmish to Old Burmese. The following changes, among others, will be presented.
Tibetan is among the earliest attested Trans-Himalayan languages and as such as had a paramount r... more Tibetan is among the earliest attested Trans-Himalayan languages and as such as had a paramount role in the reconstruction of the Ursprache. Nonetheless, in a number of ways Tibetan is phonologically innovative. This paper presents the most important Tibetan phonological innovations, updating the list given in Hill (2011) and focussing on those innovations that force a reformulation of some reconstructions. Particular sound laws to be outlined include *lʲ > ź- (Benedict's law), *rj- > rgy- (Li's law), *dz- > z- (Schiefner's law), and *-eŋ, *-ek > -iṅ, -ik (Dempsey's law).
This talk explores the contentious interpretations of the Tibetan letter 'འ' and its orthographic... more This talk explores the contentious interpretations of the Tibetan letter 'འ' and its orthographic and phonetic function, polemically engaging with Axel Schuessler's recent work on this question. While Schuessler views the usage of 'འ' as an orthographic convention without phonetic significant, this presentation argues for a historically motivated phonological significance of the letter's various uses. By drawing parallels with the capricious nature of the English 'h', we examine how both letters serve not merely as orthographic artifacts but as products of the history, including the phonological history of their respective languages.
About 10 years ago I compared various versions of the Nyatri tsenpo myth. For various reasons I a... more About 10 years ago I compared various versions of the Nyatri tsenpo myth. For various reasons I abandoned this project, but I found this summary of my findings and thought others might find it useful as an overview. All the findings are rather trivially verified yourself, so I am not sharing my disorganized notes that underpin these findings.
The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogram... more The formalization of sound changes as finite state transducers is implicit already in the Neogrammarians. For at least six decades scholars have recognized the potential of transducers for improving the speed and rigor of research in historical linguists, but almost no historical linguists actually use them. This article identifies the obstacles facing the concrete use of transducers and introduces a software package built to reconstruct Proto-Burmish using transducers.
The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of around 500 languages, ranging geographically from fr... more The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of around 500 languages, ranging geographically from from Balti Tibetan in Pakistan to Hokkien Chinese in Indonesia, with the foothills of the Himalayas and the South East Asian highlands as its center of gravity. Van Driem (2001) and Thurgood (2017) provide helpful introductions to the family
Bisherige Diskussionen über die tibetische Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Prä-und Su-per... more Bisherige Diskussionen über die tibetische Phonologie unterscheiden nicht zwischen Prä-und Su-perskriptkonsonanten. Tatsächlich, kann das Gebauch von Prä-und Superskripten unterschiedliches Sandhi-Verhalten aufweisen. Dieses Benehmen lässt sich in zwei Regeln zusammenfassen, eine Prä-skriptlöschregel und eine Superskriptlöschregel. Nach der Präskriptlöschregel, wenn eine vorangehen-de Silbe in einem Konsonanten endet, ein Präskriptkonsonant in der folgenden Silbe ausfällt, und die Superskriptlöschregel, wobei (1) wenn der Endkonsonant einer vorangehenden Silbe akut ist, und der Präskriptkonsonant des fraglichen Wortes würde gemäss der Präskriptlöschregel gelöscht, ein darauf-folgendes Superkript ebenfalls gelöscht wird, und (2) im Anlaut wird auch das Superskript gelöscht, obwohl das Präskript bestehen bleibt.
This paper looks at the initials of Proto-Karen as reconstructed by A. G. Haudricourt in his thre... more This paper looks at the initials of Proto-Karen as reconstructed by A. G. Haudricourt in his three relevant papers.
This is the complete, and extensively revised version of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming boo... more This is the complete, and extensively revised version of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The idea is to clearly and empirically explain to non-Sinologists how Old Chinese (primarily in the system of Baxter and Sagart) is reconstructed. The comments I received previously on this chapter were extremely useful and testing the patience of the public, I would implore any additional commentaries.
This is the Burmese chapter of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burme... more This is the Burmese chapter of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. All comments and criticisms welcome.
This file is the Introduction and the first chapter (about Tibetan) of my forthcoming book on the... more This file is the Introduction and the first chapter (about Tibetan) of my forthcoming book on the comparative phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. Any comments are welcome.
Most of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The i... more Most of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The idea is to clearly and empirically explain to non-Sinologists how Old Chinese (primarily in the system of Baxter and Sagart) is reconstructed. I have found it quite hard to write and think it contains factual mistakes, so any comments would be welcome.
Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society, 2017
Philological evidence and comparative phonology confirm the existence of an initial ry-in Old Bur... more Philological evidence and comparative phonology confirm the existence of an initial ry-in Old Burmese and Proto-Lolo-Burmese, evidence that is over looked in much scholarship (e.g. Matisoff 1979, 1991, etc.).
A set of four presentations that discuss a Tibetan corpus linguistics project based at SOAS Unive... more A set of four presentations that discuss a Tibetan corpus linguistics project based at SOAS University of London from 2012-2015.
Many of the world’s languages are unstudied and on the verge of disappearance. A few linguists st... more Many of the world’s languages are unstudied and on the verge of disappearance. A few linguists strive to address this problem, but compared to Indo-European languages, there is much more work to do, with only a fraction of the manpower and under immense time pressure. Over the last two decades the field of ‘documentary linguistics’ has attempted to address this situation, but with successes that can be said to be partial at best.
After considering some of the obstacles to language documentation, this talk takes a fresh look at the technical side of linguistic fieldwork. It does this from the perspective of recent technological innovations, and examines the workflows and approaches to data management in particular. I conduct two case studies, the methods through which, may hold great promise in helping communities that speak understudied languages, namely autocompletion software for mobile phones and the automatic phonetic transcription of spoken languages using neural networks.
Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the availability of w... more Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the availability of written records. Since traditional language comparison within the framework of the comparative method is largely based on manual data comparison, requiring the meticulous sifting through dictionaries, word lists, and grammars, the framework is difficult to apply, especially in times where more and more data have become available in digital form. Unfortunately, it is not possible to simply automate the process of historical language comparison, not only because computational solutions lag behind human judgments in historical linguistics, but also because they lack the flexibility that would allow them to integrate various types of information from various kinds of sources. A more promising approach is to integrate computational and classical approaches within a computer-assisted framework, "neither completely computer-driven nor ignorant of the assistance computers afford" [1, p. 4]. In this paper, we will illustrate what we consider the current state of the art of computer-assisted language comparison by presenting a workflow that starts with raw data and leads up to a stage where sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages have been identified and can be readily presented, inspected, and discussed. We illustrate this workflow with the help of a newly prepared dataset on Hmong-Mien languages. Our illustration is accompanied by Python code and instructions on how to use additional web-based tools we developed so that users can apply our workflow for their own purposes.
This paper proposes the use of network techniques in the exploration of Old Chinese phonology as ... more This paper proposes the use of network techniques in the exploration of Old Chinese phonology as reflected in the phonophoric determinatives of xiéshēng 諧聲 characters. We use the approach to examine five specific proposals in Chinese historical phonology, and whether they can be said to be recoverable on the basis of phonophoric choice. The major finding is that the type A versus type B distinction is in some cases encoded in the choice of phonophoric, while other distinctions are only spuriously if at all reflected in the phonophoric subseries.
6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (STLS-2021), 2021
This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Langua... more This document is an abstract accepted for presentation at the 6th Workshop on Sino-Tibetan Languages of Southwest China (STLS-2021) held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies on September 7-11, 2021: https://sinotibetan-japan.com/stls/ We report on progress in interdisciplinary work using state-of-the-art technology for language documentation.
Proceedings of ComputEL-4: Fourth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 2021
This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a we... more This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a web front-end originally designed to provide access to the Kaldi automatic speech recognition toolkit. The goal of this work is to make end-to-end speech recognition models available to language workers via a user-friendly graphical interface. Encouraging results are reported on (i) development of an ESPnet recipe for use in Elpis, with preliminary results on data sets previously used for training acoustic models with the Persephone toolkit along with a new data set that had not previously been used in speech recognition, and (ii) incorporating ESPnet into Elpis along with UI enhancements and a CUDA-supported Dockerfile.
Uploads
Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic
description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers
addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in
Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality,
interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide
important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of
evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to
capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and
diachronic perspective.
Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic
description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers
addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in
Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality,
interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide
important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of
evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to
capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and
diachronic perspective.
Throughout Richardson’s subsequent publications on stelae he referred to these 6 transcriptions and employed them in his own editions of the inscriptions. However, the transcriptions have not previously been published, and thus many of Richardson's readings could not be verified by other scholars. Additionally, one of the transcriptions is the only extant evidence of a 9th-century inscription which is now too eroded to be read (‘Phyong rgyas bridge-head pillar). In late 2010 Richardson's photographic negatives of these manuscript transcriptions of stelae inscriptions were serendipitously discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library.
The photographs have been made available online in September 2011 at
http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/view/all/what/MS.+Or.+Richardson+47?sort=Shelfmark%2Csort_order
85 (2) : 305-315.
A review article of
Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.
Burmese aspirate consonants have two origins in proto-Burmish, namely plain voiceless and pre-glottalized voiceless consonants (Burling 1967: 6, 31-40, Mann 1998: 67-70; Nishi 1999: 68, 94-96). Consulting Lashi, which maintains pre-glottalized consonants in the widest variety of phonetic contexts (Nishi 1999: 70), one can distinguish those Burmese words that descend from plain voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. khre < *kriy 'foot', Lashi khjei) from those that descend from pre-glottalizated voiceless initials (e.g. WBur. -khre <*ˀkriy 'gall bladder', Lashi ˀkjeiH).
Reformulating Schiefner's conjecture as a correspondence between Tibetan sC- clusters and proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants significantly reduces the number of apparent exceptions, but some still remain. In some cases Burmese fails to have the expected aspirated resonant anticipated from the s- in the Tibetan cognate (e.g. OBur. mruy, Atsi -mui³¹ 'snake', Tib. sbrul < *smrul [Simon's law]) and in other cases proto-Burmish has a pre-glottalized consonant although the Tibetan cognate has no s- initial cluster (e.g. Bur. ṅhāḥ < *ˀṅāḥ 'borrow', Tib. brña < *brṅʲa [Houghton's law]).
In this talk I will examine the patterns, both regular and irregular, in order to evaluate the robustness of Schiefner's conjecture. To reveal one of my findings—within the exceptions there are cases where the Burmese development is apparently irregular, but the correspondence with proto-Burmish still holds (e.g. WBur. la 'moon', Lashi ˀlaX-, Tib. zla < *sla).
Initials
Schiefner's conjecture, *sC > *ˀC
Burling's law, *ˀC > Ch
Matisoff's law: *ś-, *s- > s- and *č-, *ts- > ts-
Rimes
Shafer's law, -*ik> -ac, *-iŋ > -aññ
Maung Wun's law, *u>o₂ before velars
After considering some of the obstacles to language documentation, this talk takes a fresh look at the technical side of linguistic fieldwork. It does this from the perspective of recent technological innovations, and examines the workflows and approaches to data management in particular. I conduct two case studies, the methods through which, may hold great promise in helping communities that speak understudied languages, namely autocompletion software for mobile phones and the automatic phonetic transcription of spoken languages using neural networks.