This award supports a range of activities to upgrade the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT), which was begun in 1987, and which has been supported by grants from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. STEDT's mission is to clarify 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 almost 1,000,000 words from these languages, culled from some 500 sources, ranging from published dictionaries and wordlists to questionnaires solicited from field researchers, and 3,000 proto-Sino-Tibetan roots and root variants.
Among the activities to be supported by this award are further development of the database; continued etymological research, particularly comparing Chinese and Tibeto-Burman; new research on several Tibeto-Burman subgroups, including Lolo-Burmese, Kuki-Chin, Naga, Himalayish, Qiangic, Karenic, Nungish and Bodo-Garo; and the creation of a permanent public archive of both the raw project data and project findings.
