Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus

摘要叙述汉藏语系是地球上最重要的语系之一，从不同的标准来看：说话者的数量，历史文献的深度，对其他语言的影响。西方学者对汉语和这个家族的其他成员感兴趣已经有大约一个世纪了，他们收集了关于这个家族各种语言的大量信息，这是几代中国学者积累的信息的补充。然而，这一学术机构广泛分散，质量参差不齐，这是在重建语言家族历史方面取得进一步进展的主要障碍。这里提出的项目是一个极其雄心勃勃的项目：汇集整个汉藏语学术文献的主要部分，并根据这些文献合成一部连贯、准确的汉藏语词源词典和整个家族的词库。这一项目的圆满完成将使汉藏语言研究更接近印欧语言研究目前的水平，这将是语言学总体上的重大进步。提出这一项目的首席研究员可以说是世界上唯一有能力成功实施这一项目的学者，因为他在现有的汉藏学术机构中博学多才，并具有出色的历史分析和论证能力。他现在正处于职业生涯中感到准备好承担这项艰巨任务的时刻，他愿意并能够做出这一贡献，这是该领域的幸运。

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.