LSA 2009

James A. Matisoff received his A.B. (1958) and A.M. (1959) in French literature from Harvard, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1967. He taught first at Columbia (1966-70), and at Berkeley from 1970 until his retirement in 2002. His interests include Chinese and Japanese, Southeast Asian languages (especially Tibeto-Burman and Tai-Kadai), Yiddish, and historical semantics. He is the author of 7 books (3 since his retirement) and dozens of articles and monographs, and has directed nearly 30 doctoral dissertations. He is one of the founders of the annual International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. For many years he was Editor of the journal Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. He has been Principal Investigator of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987. He is considered one of the world's leading authorities on Southeast Asian linguistics.