Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus

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Abstract Narrative The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the most important on earth, by various measures: number of speakers, depth of historical documentation, influence on other languages. There have been Western scholars interested in Chinese and the other members of the family for about a century now, and they have gathered a great deal of information about the various languages in the family, adding that to the store of information accumulated by generations of Chinese scholars. This body of scholarship is however widely scattered, and of very uneven quality, which has been a major hindrance to further progress in reconstructing the history of the language family. The project proposed here is an extremely ambitious one: to bring together a major portion of the entire body of scholarly documentation of the Sino-Tibetan languages, and synthesize from it a coherent and accurate etymological dictionary and thesaurus of the entire family. A successful completion of this project will bring Sino-Tibetan linguistic study much closer to the current level of accomplishment enjoyed by Indo-European linguistic research, and in so doing will constitute a major advance in linguistics generally. The Principal Investigator proposing this project is arguably the only scholar in the world in a position to carry it out successfully, because of his vast erudition in the existing body of Sino-Tibetan scholarship and his brilliant abilities at historical analysis and argumentation. He is now at the point in his career at which he feels prepared to undertake the mammoth task, and it is the good fortune of the field that he is willing and able to make this contribution.