Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language documentation of Tai Khamti in Myanmar

长期以来，东南亚一直是美国的战略利益区域，也是语言多样性极大的区域。这个项目调查了缅甸Khamti区的泰语，这个地方几乎没有进行过语言田野调查。它将传统语言文献与现代定量分析相结合，使用新的现场数据来提高我们对这些语言的理解。这种混合方法使传统方法无法充分回答的研究问题能够得到创新的答案，而现代方法仅凭现有的数据无法回答这些问题。田野调查将侧重于泰语中历史音调和音系学的现代证据，同时也为数据提供重要的语言和文化背景。该项目还从十几个国家发布的资源中，对所有现有的词汇数据进行了雄心勃勃的调查。这些结果将与新的田野数据一起组织到一个为定量研究泰语历史而设计的数据库中，该数据库将被用来制作一篇论文、一个文本语料库和一本比较词典。作为缅甸首批语言田野调查的一部分，这个项目提高了我们对世界上一个长期无法到达的地区的语言状况的了解，这有助于加强美国与缅甸的关系。这些地区的改善有助于东南亚地区更大的地区稳定，进一步促进美国在该地区的政治和经济利益。

Southeast Asia has long been an area of US strategic interest, as well as an area of immense linguistic diversity. This project investigates Tai languages spoken in Khamti District, Myanmar (Burma), a place that has seen almost no linguistic fieldwork. It unites traditional language documentation with modern quantitative analysis, using new field data to improve our understanding of these languages. This hybrid approach enables innovative answers to research questions that traditional methods have not sufficiently answered, and that modern methods cannot answer with only the data currently available. Fieldwork will focus on modern evidence for historical tones and phonology in the Tai languages, while also providing important linguistic and cultural context for the data. The project also undertakes an ambitious survey of all existing lexical data, from resources published in more than a dozen countries. These results will be organized alongside the new field data into a database designed for quantitative study of Tai language history, which will be used to produce a dissertation, a corpus of texts, and a comparative dictionary. As some of the first linguistic fieldwork in Myanmar, this project improves our understanding of the language situation in a long inaccessible part of the world, which serves to strengthen US relations with Myanmar. Improvement in these areas contributes to greater regional stability within Southeast Asia, further advancing American political and economic interests in this part of the world.