Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT)

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9808952MATISOFFThe Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages constitute one of the great language families of the world, with well over a billion speakers. Yet despite the rapid development of ST 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 Tl~esaurus) project was started in 1987, charged with gathering data from both extant published works and the growing body of fieldwork and integrating 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.The reconstructed proto-roots will serve as main entries in the Dictionary, followed by those words which derive from them in the modern ST languages. Along with the first fascicle of the Dictionary itself, a number of electronic and hardcopy versions of materials supporting the reconstructions have been or will be published, including a directory of language names (published in 1995), a compendium of phonological inventories (published in 1997), and detailed sound correspondences in the form of a "sound law database."In order to provide the linguistic community with access to the data in as timely a fashion as possible, the project is planning to modify its approach to the publication of the fascicles. Certain verified and legally distributable portions of the "raw data" in the database will be made available electronically during 1998 via CDROM and the WWW. As new fascicles become ready they will be included in these electronic media, and printed versions will be "demand published" in much the same way that new software releases are created. Thus, users of the database will be able to "upgrade" their versions of the database and fascicles as soon as results become available. While this will make some of the results of the research initially tentative and subject to revision, it will also allow STEDT to make valuable resources quickly available and to collect early feedback on the work from colleagues all over the world.