James A Matisoff
Biographic Data
| ID | 199616 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James A Matisoff |
| GIVEN NAMES | James A |
| FAMILY NAME | Matisoff |
| SIGNATURE | MATISOFF J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Paddy-field dike
This brief note proposes a new Proto-Sino-Tibetan etymon for FIELD-DIKE, the dike between irrigated paddy fields, and provides an etymology relating Chinese and Lahu forms. It also discusses related etymologies with similar rhymes in Lahu and their reflexes in Burmese. There is also a postscript on the Written Burmese rhyme -añ
Scouring the world for transgenetic interrelationships
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Stung by a bee, you fear a fly
qhɔ-qhô ί-kâʔ cɔ̀, Lâhō tɔ̂-mɔ̂cɔ̀.The mountains have [springs of] water; the Lahu have proverbs. (#1012)Proverbs are a particularly interesting type of sentential formulaic expression. This paper analyses a rich corpus of proverbs in Lahu, a language of the Central Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, in terms of both their syntactic structure and their semantic content. Overwhelmingly bipartite in form, these proverbs reflect cultural and moral pre…
Response to Laurent Sagart’s review of Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman
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Merit and the Millennium
Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman
LoC Class: PL3553, LoC Subject Headings: Tibeto-Burman languages, Tibeto-Burman languages--Grammar, Reconstruction (Linguistics
Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears
Reviewed Work: Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences) by James A. Matisoff Review by: Ülker Vanci-Osam. Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the publisher version (published version) of this article is only available via subscription. You may click URI (with DOI: 0.2307/1178991) and have access to the Publisher Version of this article through the publisher w…
Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears
In this delightful book, the author enumerates and classifies the formulas Yiddish speakers use to express their emotions. It is a rarity among scholarly books, for it brings joy while it teaches; it makes us smile, sometimes roar with laughter, while it develops the most rigorous linguistic argumentation. The author analyzes the many kinds of Yiddish "psycho-ostensives"—ranging from blessings and thanks to lamentations and curses. To a person wh…
On 'Sino-Bodic' and other symptoms of neosubgroupitis
The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering aStammbaumof the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities,…
Mary R. Haas
MARY R. HAAS Mary Haas, one of Edward Sapir's last surviving students, the guiding spirit of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly three decades, and the thirty-ninth president of the Linguistic Society of America (1963), died at her home in Berkeley on May 17, 1996. She was 86 and had been in declining health for several years. Haas was born in Richmond, Indiana, on January 23, 1910, into a Pennsylvania German family …
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics
This book challenges the approaches to human interaction based on supposedly universal 'maxims of conversation' and 'principles of politeness,' which fly in the face of reality as experienced by millions of people crossing language boundaries (refugees, immigrants, etc.) and which cannot help in the practical tasks of cross-cultural communication and education. In contrast to such approaches, this book is both theoretical and practical: it shows …
Sound symbolism
Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound symbolic processes, they g…
Protean Prosodies
Selected Papers on Comparative Tai Studies
The Dictionary of Lahu
Sino-Tibetan Linguistics
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Bulging Monosyllables
Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 543-559
On Megalocomparison
1 . Joseph H. Greenberg's Language in the Americas ( LIA; 1987) has been greeted with dismay by many specialists in Amerindian linguistics 1 (cf. Chafe 1987, Campbell 1988, Adelaar 1989), and defended by the author in a reply to Campbell in Language 65.1 (1989)
The Grammar of Lahu
Translucent insights
The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of 'prestandard Old Burmese' (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative wo…
Conjugal Bliss
Sketch of Thulung Grammar, with Three Texts and a Glossary
Cornell University East Asia Papers, No. 6, 254 p
Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman
The Deep Syntax of Lisu Sentences
This thesis is based on some fourteen years of study of the Lisu language, nine and a half of which were spent on the field . During this time I have, to a reasonable extent, acquired native-speaker intuitions about the language, and this thesis is largely an attempt to explain these intuitions . I have in most cases used my own judgement in deciding whether sentences are grammatical or not, but where I have been uncertain, or where a point I hav…
On the Demise of the Proto-Tibeto-Burman Mid Vowels
The immediate impetus for writing this paper was a confused article by Nathan W. Hill of SOAS (2011), which, inter alia, purported to turn the interpretation of an established Tibeto-Burman sound correspondence, Written Tibetan -o(-) / Written Burmese -wa(-), on its head. This reinterpretation can easily be shown to be wrong, though this is of little importance compared to certain wider issues this article raises. At the risk of being accused of …
Sino-Tibetan a conspectus
A comprehensive account of the Sino-Tibetan, a language stock comparable in size and diversification to Indo-European and comprising Chinese, Karen and over a hundred Tibetan-Burman languages. Dr Benedict presents a systematic analysis of the morphology and phonology of the main descendants of the stock, traces their family relationships and reconstructs in outline the parent language, Sino-Tibetan. There is a glossary of Tibeto-Burman index, whi…
Sino-Tibetan Linguistics
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
On Megalocomparison
1 . Joseph H. Greenberg's Language in the Americas ( LIA; 1987) has been greeted with dismay by many specialists in Amerindian linguistics 1 (cf. Chafe 1987, Campbell 1988, Adelaar 1989), and defended by the author in a reply to Campbell in Language 65.1 (1989)
Proto Lolo-Burmese
On 'Sino-Bodic' and other symptoms of neosubgroupitis
The higher-order subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman has been recently up for debate. The modern era of TB/Sino-Tibetan subgrouping began with Benedict 1972 (henceforth /STC), where that great comparativist refrained from offering aStammbaumof the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing Jingpho at the centre of diversity of the whole vast TB family (see Fig. 1.) Despite several peculiarities,…
Sino-Tibetan
Merit and the Millennium
Glottal Dissimilation and the Lahu High-Rising Tone
Protean Prosodies
Translucent insights
The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of 'prestandard Old Burmese' (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative wo…
Proto Lolo-Burmese
Glottal Dissimilation and the Lahu High-Rising Tone
Auxiliary Verbs in Myang of Northern Thailand
Book Review| February 01 1970 Auxiliary Verbs in Myang of Northern Thailand Auxiliary Verbs in Myang of Northern Thailand. By Norman Arthur. Mundhenk, Chiengmai, Thailand: Translations Department, American Bible Society, 1967. v, 152 pp. Appendix. (Hartford Studies in Linguistics, No. 22.) np. James A. Matisoff James A. Matisoff Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Asian Studies (1970) 29 (2): …
Tangkhul Naga and Comparative Tibeto-Burman
After reviewing ]3hat's ljook, an attempt is made to illustrate the kind of contribution such wellrecnrded data can make to TibetoBurman studies in general.PTB iniLial tieiar clusters are examiued in this c'ontext, with especial attention to the complicating rule ef pretixes, Various features of the PTB syllable-final where T:mgkhul data is of interest are discussed, fo11owed by some remarks on Tangkhul refiexes of proto word-families.'Iiangkhul …
Tankhur Naga Vocabulary
Sino-Tibetan a conspectus
A comprehensive account of the Sino-Tibetan, a language stock comparable in size and diversification to Indo-European and comprising Chinese, Karen and over a hundred Tibetan-Burman languages. Dr Benedict presents a systematic analysis of the morphology and phonology of the main descendants of the stock, traces their family relationships and reconstructs in outline the parent language, Sino-Tibetan. There is a glossary of Tibeto-Burman index, whi…
Linguistics
A Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese
The Loloish Tonal Split Revisited
Sino-Tibetan
An Introduction to the Burmese Writing System
The Grammar of Lahu
Trickster and the Village Women
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 593-636
Componential Analysis of Lushai Phonology
Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman
The Deep Syntax of Lisu Sentences
This thesis is based on some fourteen years of study of the Lisu language, nine and a half of which were spent on the field . During this time I have, to a reasonable extent, acquired native-speaker intuitions about the language, and this thesis is largely an attempt to explain these intuitions . I have in most cases used my own judgement in deciding whether sentences are grammatical or not, but where I have been uncertain, or where a point I hav…
Sketch of Thulung Grammar, with Three Texts and a Glossary
Cornell University East Asia Papers, No. 6, 254 p
Conjugal Bliss
Translucent insights
The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of 'prestandard Old Burmese' (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative wo…
The Grammar of Lahu
Bulging Monosyllables
Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 543-559
On Megalocomparison
1 . Joseph H. Greenberg's Language in the Americas ( LIA; 1987) has been greeted with dismay by many specialists in Amerindian linguistics 1 (cf. Chafe 1987, Campbell 1988, Adelaar 1989), and defended by the author in a reply to Campbell in Language 65.1 (1989)
The Dictionary of Lahu
Sino-Tibetan Linguistics
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Selected Papers on Comparative Tai Studies
Linguistics (30 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · History (24 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (10 works) · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations (9 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)