Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language documentation of Tai Khamti in Myanmar

东南亚长期以来一直是美国的战略利益地区，也是一个语言多样性巨大的地区。本项目调查了缅甸坎迪地区的泰语，这个地区几乎没有语言学方面的田野调查。它将传统的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的创新答案成为可能，而现代方法仅凭现有数据无法回答。田野工作将集中在历史声调和音韵在台语现代证据，同时也提供了重要的语言和文化背景的数据。该项目还对所有现有词汇数据进行了雄心勃勃的调查，这些数据来自十几个国家出版的资源。这些结果将与新的实地数据一起组织成一个数据库，用于定量研究台语历史，这将用于产生论文，文本语料库和比较词典。作为缅甸第一批语言实地考察的一部分，该项目提高了我们对世界上一个长期无法进入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。这些领域的改善有助于加强东南亚地区的稳定，进一步促进美国在这一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.