Studies In The Historical Phonology Of Asian Languages

This volume owes its genesis to a series of lectures on various aspects of the historical phonology of Asian languages, sponsored by the Asian Linguistics Colloquium of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature of the University of Washington, in Seattle. The volume includes papers on both theoretical and applied aspects of Asian linguistics, and topics examined include vowel harmony, dialect variation and "inherent variability," historical reconstruction based on written records, historical reconstruction based on the comparative method, accentology, and language standardization. While some of the papers are comparative in nature, others deal with effects of language contact on phonological systems. Languages and language families dealt with are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Altaic, Chinese, Uralic, Korean, and Tai.

This volume owes its genesis to a series of lectures on various aspects of the historical phonology of Asian languages, sponsored by the Asian Linguistics Colloquium of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature of the University of Washington, in Seattle. The volume includes papers on both theoretical and applied aspects of Asian linguistics, and topics examined include vowel harmony, dialect variation and “inherent variability”, historical reconstruction based on written records, historical reconstruction based on the comparative method, accentology, and language standardization. While some of the papers are comparative in nature, others deal with effects of language contact on phonological systems. Languages and language families dealt with are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Altaic, Chinese, Uralic, Korean, and Tai.

An original new perspective on the shared history of Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan, with a particular focus on their phonological development.

This volume is a tribute to Professor Vovin’s research and a summary of the latest developments in his fields of expertise.

This book adopts a wide focus on the range of East Asian languages, in both their pre-modern and modern forms, within the specific topic area of language change. It contains sections on dialect studies, contact linguistics, socio-linguistics and syntax/phonology and deals with all three major languages of East Asia: Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Individual chapters cover pre-Sino-Japanese phonology, nominalizers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean; Japanese loanwords in Taiwan Mandarin; changes in Korean honorifics; the tense and aspect system of Japanese; and language policy in Japan. The book will be of interest to linguists working on East Asian languages, and will be of value to a range of general linguists working in comparative or historical linguistics, socio-linguistics, language typology and language contact.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

Published in the early part of this century, Bernhard Karlgren's classic work Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise laid the foundation in western sinology for the scientific reconstruction of Chinese pronunciation. In this present study E.G. Pulleyblank gives the first full-scale review of Karlgren's work, taking into account advances in knowledge over the past fifty years in both the history of the Chinese language and in general linguistic theory.

Dedicated to John B. Whitman, this collection of seventeen articles provides a forum for cutting-edge theoretical research on a wide range of linguistic phenomena in a wide variety of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Austronesian, Indo-Aryan, and Thai. Ranging from syntax and morphology to semantics, acquisition, processing and phonology, from synchronic and/or diachronic perspectives, this collection reflects the breadth of the honoree’s research interests, which span multiple research subfields in numerous Asian languages.