Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus

汉藏语系是地球上最重要的语系之一，从使用人数、历史文献的深度、对其他语言的影响等方面来看都是如此。大约一个世纪以来，西方学者一直对汉语和这个家族的其他成员感兴趣，他们收集了大量关于这个家族中各种语言的信息，补充了几代中国学者积累的信息。然而，这方面的学术研究非常分散，质量参差不齐，这是在重建语族历史方面取得进一步进展的主要障碍。这里提出的计划是一项极其雄心勃勃的计划：汇集汉藏文学术文献的大部分，并从中合成一部连贯而准确的汉藏文语源词典和全科词库。这个项目的成功完成将使汉藏语言研究更接近印欧语言研究目前的成就水平，这样做将构成语言学总体上的重大进步。提出这个项目的首席研究员可以说是世界上唯一一个有能力成功实施这个项目的学者，因为他在现有的汉藏学术体系中有着广泛的博学，并且他在历史分析和论证方面有着出色的能力。他现在正处于职业生涯的关键时刻，他觉得自己已经准备好承担这项艰巨的任务，他愿意并且能够做出这一贡献，这是这个领域的幸运。

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.