Sino Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Sino-Tibetan (ST), comprising Chinese on the one hand and the hundreds of Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages on the other, constitutes one of the great language families of the world, with well over a billion speakers. Many languages of the family are poorly attested and endangered, and the relationships among even the better known ones remain controversial. STEDT (the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project) began at U.C. Berkeley in 1987 with a twofold goal: (1) to create an etymological dictionary reconstructing the meaningful spoken units of the ancestor languages at major taxonomic levels (e.g., Proto-Kuki-Chin, Proto-Lolo-Burmese, Proto-TB, Proto-ST), paying due attention to typological and phonological plausibility; and (2) to produce a semantically based historical thesaurus, classifying the reconstructed roots by meaning, and recognizing phonosemantic variation at all time depths. The backbone of STEDT research is an online MySQL database system with two main parts: (1) A lexical database containing nearly a million records of disparate types, for hundreds of languages and dialects, drawn from some 500 sources. (2) A database of reconstructed protoforms including some 3,000 roots and root variants. Distinguishing true cognates from borrowings is especially difficult in this complex linguistic area where multilingualism is pervasive. Together with work by specialists in other language families of southern China and Southeast Asia (Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, Mon-Khmer, Austronesian), STEDT research is helping to decide larger questions about the interrelationships among these great families. During the first year of the new grant period, a new user-friendly browser-based query interface will be created and made available to the public. The second and third years will be devoted to the creation of an online "collaboratory", to solicit new ST comparative/historical data and findings from linguists worldwide. Visit STEDT on the web at http://stedt.berkeley.edu.