James A. Matisoff is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. His chief research interests include Southeast Asian languages (especially Tibeto-Burman and Tai), Chinese, Japanese, field linguistics, Yiddish studies, historical semantics, psychosemantics, language typology, and areal linguistics.
After having first taught at Columbia University (1966-69), he joined the Berkeley faculty in 1970. He has conducted fieldwork on Lahu and other Tibeto-Burman languages in Thailand (1965-66, 1970, 1976-77, 1985, 1991) and China (1983, 1984, 1991). He is a former editor of the journal, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, and is principal investigator of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, which has been supported by NSF and NEH since 1987. He is author of The Grammar of Lahu; Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman; Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-ostensive Expressions in Yiddish; The Dictionary of Lahu, and Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction.
During his sabbatical in Taiwan (1995-96) he worked on a comprehensive volume entitled Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia to appear in the Cambridge Language Survey series and did a month's fieldwork in Yunnan. With the completion and publication of HPTB, work on Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia has resumed at full force. Other current projects include an English-Lahu Dictionary and a collection of Lahu texts.
He is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on Southeast Asian Linguistics.
Prof. James A. Matisoff
University of California
Department of Linguistics
1203 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-2650
email: matisoff@socrates.berkeley.edu
Fax: (510) 643-9911
Dept. phone: (510) 643-9910
