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Translucent insights: a look at Proto-Sino-Tibetan through Gordon H. Luce's Comparative word-list1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

James A. Matisoff
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Extract

The great South-East Asian linguist and epigrapher, Gordon H. Luce, devoted many decades of his long life to the decipherment and analysis of the inscriptions of Old Burma. He had long intended to draw on the unparalleled wealth of materials in his files to produce a comparative lexicon of ‘prestandard Old Burmese’ (OB). As Professor Henderson explains in her moving introduction, Luce's advancing years and failing eyesight caused A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan (CWL) to be less ambitious in scope or polished in format than Luce would have wished. Even so, the CWL is a mine of fascinating comparative material, not only for OB, where Luce's first-hand expertise was second to none, but also for Archaic Chinese (AC) and Written Tibetan (WT), where he had to rely for his data on Karlgren's reconstructions and Jäschke's dictionary.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , October 1983 , pp. 462 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1983

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Footnotes

1

G. H. Luce: A comparative word-list of Old Burmese, Chinese and Tibetan, xi, 88 pp. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1981. £3.

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