Contributions To Sino Tibetan Studies

This book is a Festschrift volume dedicated to Emeritus Professor Nicholas C. Bodman, by his students, colleagues and friends and consists of a selection of contributions that match his interests in the descriptive, historical and comparative study of Chinese dialects (especially Min dialects) and the fields of Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan linguistics. The book is organized into sections: 1) General Compilation and Analysis (with articles by J.A. Matisov and M.J. Hashimoto), 2) Southeast Asian Languages (E.J.A. Henderson, R.B. Jones, W.J. Gedney, S. Egerod and M. Sherard), 3) Early Recorded Forms of Chinese (P. L-M Serruys, W.H. Baxter III, W. South Coblin and E.G. Pulleyblank), 4) Early Reconstructed Forms of Chinese (J. McCoy, J. Norman and K. Chang), 5) Modern Chinese Dialects (Y.C. Li, T. Light and A.R. Walton). These contributions by foremost scholars are significant. They throw new light and supply important new data on the linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan fields.

The Sino-Tibetan languages form the largest language family in the world in terms of native speakers, of whom there are some 1.4 billion spread across East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. The family consists of two branches: Sinitic, consisting of the Chinese languages (including Cantonese and Hakka), and Tibeto-Burman, which as well as Tibetan and Burmese includes several hundred further languages spoken from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south, and from northern Pakistan in the west to northeastern Vietnam in the east. This four-volume collection focuses on journal articles, with a small selection of seminal contributions from the book literature. Although the majority of the material is drawn from sources published in the past thirty years, some classic pieces are included; for example, a paper on Tibetan initials by F. K. Li which was published in 1933 and has never been surpassed. This new Major Work from Routledge is a set which someone new to the field of Sino-Tibetan studies could go to in order to get a general idea of the development and current state of the art of the subject, as aside from the seminal articles, there are introductions by the Editor that contextualise the articles and also cite relevant literature that built on the seminal articles. A veteran could also go to these volumes as an easy source for the most frequently cited articles in the field.

PIATS 2006: Tibetan studies : proceedings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Konigswinter 2006. Includes bibliographical references.

Covering the social, cultural, and political development of Tibet from the seventh century to the modern period, this resource reproduces essential, hard-to-find essays from the past fifty years of Tibetan studies, along with several new contributions. Beginning with Tibet's emergence as a regional power and concluding with its profound contemporary transformations, the collection is both a general and specific history, connecting the actions of individuals, communities, and institutions to broader historical trends shaping Asia and the world. With contributions from American, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan scholars, the anthology reflects the international character of Tibetan studies and its multiple, interdisciplinary perspectives. By far the most concise scholarly anthology on Tibetan civilization in any Western language, this reader draws a clear portrait of Tibet's history, its relation to its neighbors, and its role in world affairs.