James Matisoff

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James A. Matisoff (born July 14, 1937) is a professor emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.

Matisoff was born July 14, 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts to a working-class family. He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959 and received a degree in Romance Languages and Literatures (A.B.) in 1958 and a degree in French Literature (A.M.) in 1959. After studying Japanese at International Christian University for one year (1960-1961), he returned to Harvard to study linguistics. He was not satisfied with the linguistics program at Harvard and opted to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967.

Matisoff's doctoral dissertation was a grammar of the Lahu language, a Tibeto-Burman language belonging to the Loloish branch of the family. He spent a year doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies and made several field studies thereafter. His Grammar of Lahu was notable both for its depth of detail and the theoretical eclecticism which informed his description of the language.

After four years teaching at Columbia University (1966-1969), Matisoff accepted a professorship at Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 2001. While there, he founded and directed the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, a long running project aimed at producing an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field.

He invented the term Cheshirisation, which refers to the trace remains of an otherwise disappeared sound in a word, and the term sesquisyllabic to describe the iambic stress pattern of words in languages spoken in Southeast Asia, such as the Mon-Khmer languages.

Bibliography

• The Loloish tonal split revisited, 1972.
• The grammar of Lahu, 1973; 2 ed. 1982.
• Variational semantics in Tibeto-Burman: The 'organic' approach to linguistic comparison, 1978.
• Blessings, curses, hopes, and fears: Psycho-ostensive expressions in Yiddish, 1979; 2 ed. 2000.
• Matisoff, J. (1988). The dictionary of Lahu.
• Matisoff, J. (1990). "On megalocomparison". Language 66.1, 106-20.
• Matisoff, J. (1991). "Areal and universal dimensions of grammatization in Lahu." Elizabeth C. Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, 1991, Vol. II, 383—453.
• Matisoff, J. (1991). "Jiburish revisisted." Acta Orientalia (Copenhagen) 52: 91-114.
• Matisoff, J. (1997) Sino-Tibetan Numeral Systems: prefixes, protoforms and problems, 1997.
• Matisoff, J. (2003) Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction.

External links

• Personal page at the STEDT project website
• Faculty page at the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics
• STEDT project page

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