James Matisoff
James Alan Matisoff (simplified Chinese: 马蒂索夫; traditional Chinese: 馬蒂索夫; pinyin: Mǎdìsuǒfū or simplified Chinese: 马提索夫; traditional Chinese: 馬提索夫; pinyin: Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.
James Matisoff
Susan Matisoff
A Grammar of the Lahu Language (1967)
馬蒂索夫/馬提索夫
马蒂索夫/马提索夫
Mǎdìsuǒfū/Mǎtísuǒfū
Mǎdìsuǒfū/Mǎtísuǒfū
Education[edit]
Matisoff was born July 14, 1937, in Boston, Massachusetts, to a working-class family of Eastern European Jewish origins. His father, a fish seller, was an immigrant from a town near Minsk, Byelorussian SSR (now Belarus).[1]
He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later a scholar of Japanese literature, when the two shared a Japanese class. He received two degrees from Harvard: an AB in Romance Languages and Literatures (1958) and an AM in French Literature (1959). He then studied Japanese at International Christian University from 1960 to 1961.
He did his doctoral studies in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where Mary Haas, co-founder of the department, was then chair. Haas had been a student of Edward Sapir while at University of Chicago and Yale University, and through her own extensive research in descriptive and documentary linguistics had become a specialist in Native American languages and an authority on Thai. Haas was instrumental in Matisoff's decision to research a language of mainland Southeast Asia for his dissertation.[2]
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 in northern Thailand doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies with support from a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. He completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967, and made several field studies thereafter through an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. His Grammar of Lahu is notable both for its depth of detail and the theoretical eclecticism which informed his description of the language. He later published an extensive dictionary of Lahu (1988) and a corresponding English-Lahu lexicon (2006).