Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT)

汉藏(ST)语言是世界上最大的语系之一，讲汉语的人数超过10亿。然而，尽管近几十年来ST研究发展迅速，但人们对它们的了解仍然很少；事实上，该家族的一些分支仍然几乎没有人研究。为了填补历史语言学研究的这一空白，1987年启动了STEDT(汉藏词源词典和TL~esaurus)项目，负责从现有的已出版著作和不断增长的田野调查中收集数据，并将其整合为一个连贯的整体。该项目的具体目标是出版一本关于大约6000年前使用的祖先语言原始汉藏(PST)的词源词典。该词典是按语义场组织的，因此它将构成一部PST词典。重构的原词根将作为词典的主要词条，紧随其后的是现代ST语言中由它们派生的词。除《词典》本身的第一个分册外，已经出版或将出版若干支持重建的电子版和硬拷贝版本的材料，包括语文名录(1995年出版)、音系库简编(1997年出版)和“声音规律数据库”形式的详细的声音对应。为了使语言界能够以尽可能及时的方式获取这些数据，该项目正在计划修改其出版分册的方法。1998年期间，将通过光盘和万维网以电子方式提供数据库中某些经核实和可合法分发的“原始数据”部分。当新的分册准备好后，它们将被包括在这些电子媒体中，印刷版本将以与创建新软件版本大致相同的方式被“按需出版”。因此，一旦结果可用，数据库用户将能够“升级”其数据库和分册的版本。虽然这将使这项研究的一些结果处于初步试探性的和可修改的状态，但它也将使STEDT能够迅速提供宝贵的资源，并从世界各地的同事那里收集对工作的早期反馈。

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.