Comparative Kadai

Defines the linguistic range of an immense, interrelated and varied area extending from eastern India to southern China, including the southeast Asian peninsula.

The Routledge Language Family Series is aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates of linguistics and language, or those with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistics anthropology and language development. With close to 100 million speakers, Tai-Kadai constitutes one of the world's major language families. The Tai-Kadai Languages provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions in the area. It presents an important overview of Thai that includes extensive cross-referencing to other sections of the volume and sign-posting to sources in the bibliography. The volume also includes much new material on Lao and other Tai-Kadai languages, several of which are described here for the first time. Much-needed and highly useful, The Tai-Kadai Languages is a key work for professionals and students in linguistics, as well as anthropologists and area studies specialists. ANTHONY V. N. DILLER is Foundation Director of the National Thai Studies Centre, at the Australian National University. JEROLD A. EDMONDSON is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas Arlington and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Scholars. YONGXIAN LUO is Senior Lecturer in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne and a member of the Australian Linguistic Society.

This volume provides accurate and reliable data from 1,159 common cognates found in 19 dialects from the Tai language family. Originally collected by noted Tai linguist, the late William J. Gedney, the data are organized into the three branches of the Tai language family, the Southwestern, the Central, and the Northern, to facilitate comparisons among the various sound systems within the individual branches and within the Tai language family as a whole. Supplementing the cognates are phonological descriptions of each of the dialects. Included among the nineteen dialects are Siamese, White Tai, Black Tai, Shan, Lue, Yay, Saek, and dialects found at Leiping, Lungming, Pingsiang, and Ningming in China. The meticulous attention paid to consonants, vowels, and tones found in each cognate will allow for further dialect studies, for the investigation of questions concerning the tripartite division of the Tai language family, and for the continuing investigation into the reconstruction of the Proto-Tai language family and its wider genetic relationships.

Defines the linguistic range of an immense, interrelated and varied area extending from eastern India to southern China, including the southeast Asian peninsula.

The handbook will offer a survey of the field of linguistics in the early 21st century for the Southeast Asian Linguistic Area. The last half century has seen a great increase in work on language contact, work in genetic, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics, and since the 1990s especially documentation of endangered languages. The book will provide an account of work in these areas, focusing on the achievements of SEAsian linguistics, as well as the challenges and unresolved issues, and provide a survey of the relevant major publications and other available resources. We will address: Survey of the languages of the area, organized along genetic lines, with discussion of relevant political and cultural background issues Theoretical/descriptive and typological issues Genetic classification and historical linguistics Areal and contact linguistics Other areas of interest such as sociolinguistics, semantics, writing systems, etc. Resources (major monographs and monograph series, dictionaries, journals, electronic data bases, etc.) Grammar sketches of languages representative of the genetic and structural diversity of the region.

The studies in this book represent the rich, diverse and substantial research being conducted today in the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. The chapters cover a broad scope. Several studies address questions of language relatedness, often challenging conventional assumptions about the status of language contact as an explanatory factor in accounting for linguistic similarities. Several address the question of Mainland Southeast Asia as a linguistic area, exploring new ways to imagine and define the boundaries, and indeed the boundedness, of a Mainland Southeast Asia area. Two contributions rethink the received notion of the 'sesquisyllable' with new empirical and theoretical angles. And a set of chapters explores topics in the morphology and syntax of the region's languages, sometimes challenging orthodox assumptions and claims about what a typical language of Mainland Southeast Asia is like. Written by leading researchers in the field, and with a substantial overview of current knowledge and new directions by the volume editors N. J. Enfield and Bernard Comrie, this book will serve as an authoritative source on where the linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia is at, and where it is heading.

The Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology focuses on the material culture and lifeways of the peoples of prehistoric and early historic East and Southeast Asia; their origins, behavior and identities as well as their biological, linguistic and cultural differences and commonalities. Emphasis is placed upon the interpretation of material culture to illuminate and explain social processes and relationships as well as behavior, technology, patterns and mechanisms of long-term change and chronology, in addition to the intellectual history of archaeology as a discipline in this diverse region. The Handbook augments archaeologically-focused chapters contributed by regional scholars by providing histories of research and intellectual traditions, and by maintaining a broadly comparative perspective. Archaeologically-derived data are emphasized with text-based documentary information, provided to complement interpretations of material culture. The Handbook is not restricted to art historical or purely descriptive perspectives; its geographical coverage includes the modern nation-states of China, Mongolia, Far Eastern Russia, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.

The relation of language variation to reconstructed languages and to the methodology of reconstruction has long been neglected. The articles in the present volume consider this relationship from a number of different angles, with a number of different focuses. Several of the papers discuss evidence from Germanic, either Proto-Germanic (Joseph, Schwink), or daughter languages such as Dutch (Goss & Howell), Afrikaans (Roberge), Newcastle English (Milroy), and a Wisconsin German dialect (Geiger & Salmons). Other papers look at Italian (Cravens), Spanish (Harris-Northall), and the non-Indo-European languages or families Aramaic (Miller), and Proto-Hmong-Mien (Ratliff), and the Southeast Asian languages Phan Rang Cham and Tsat (Thurgood). In doing so they bring together a number of interconnected issues which are of current concern in comparative and historical linguistics.