With National Science Foundation support, Dr. James A. Matisoff will complete the final cycle of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT), which was founded in 1987 at the University of California, Berkeley. This project has the mission of clarifying the history of Sino-Tibetan, one of the greatest linguistic families of the world, with over a billion speakers, consisting of Chinese on the one hand, and the 250 understudied languages of the vast Tibeto-Burman group on the other. To achieve this goal, STEDT has created large computer databases of words from these languages (almost 700,000 at last count), culled from over 500 sources, ranging from published dictionaries and wordlists to questionnaires solicited from field researchers.
STEDT has produced a steady stream of publications, culminating in the 800-page Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction (University of California Press, August, 2003). In this book, the pronunciations and meanings of over 2800 roots are reconstructed for the ancestor languages from which all the modern Sino-Tibetan languages descend, Proto-Tibeto-Burman and/or Proto-Sino-Tibetan. During the final stages of the project, to be accomplished during this grant period, the focus will be shifted to electronic publication, making our data and analyses part of the public domain. The STEDT project has already advanced the state of research into East and Southeast Asian languages, and will help to decide further questions about the interrelationships among all the language families of this complex region of the world, including Tai-Kadai, Mon-Khmer, Austronesian, and Hmong-Mien.
