SBR-9511034 MATISOFF ABSTRACT The Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages constitute one of the great language families of the world. Yet despite the rapid development of Sino-Tibetan studies in recent decades, they remain poorly understood; indeed, some branches of the family are still virtually unstudied. To fill this vacuum in historical linguistic research, the STEDT (Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus) project gatheres data from both extant published works and the growing body of field work and intergrates them into a coherent whole. The concrete goal of the project is the publication of an etymological dictionary of the ancestor language, Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST), spoken perhaps 6000 years ago. The Dictionary is organized by semantic fields, so it will constitute a "thesaurus" of PST. A large computer database of etymological and lexicographic information has been created to support the research required to publish the Dictionary. This database consists of a lexical file (containing at this time over l90,000 words in about 200 languages and dialects), an etyma file (containing over 2,400 reconstructions), and ancillary files containing references to language names, bibliographic citations, extensive etymological notes, and semantic diagrams. Sources for lexical data range from published dictionaries and wordlists to questionnaires solicited from fleld researchers. Along with the Dictionary, electronic and hardcopy versions of materials supporting the reconstructions will be published, including a directory of language names, a compendium of phonological inventories, and detailed sound correspondences in the form of a "sound law database."
