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44-851: James Matisoff was the director of STEDT for nearly three decades. The Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area journal, now published by Benjamins Pub. Co. , was also part of the STEDT project. In addition, the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL) were mostly organized by STEDT project members since the 1990s. In 1987, James Matisoff began the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, which aimed to produce an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan languages organized by semantic field. The project maintains

88-490: A dialect continuum , where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even

132-485: A large, publicly accessible lexical database of nearly one million records, with data on Sino-Tibetan languages from over 500 sources. This database is used to identify and mark cognates for the purposes of better understanding the historical development of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the subgroupings of the languages therein, and to reconstruct the theoretical proto-language of the language family. The project

176-591: A potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages , ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian ) to "severely endangered" ( Franco-Provençal , most of

220-581: 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

264-836: A single country. Portuguese is the official language of six African countries ( Angola , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique , Equatorial Guinea , and São Tomé and Príncipe ), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau , while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000 —are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians . In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants. In Oceania, Portuguese

308-734: Is Spanish , followed by Portuguese , French , Italian and Romanian , which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries. In Europe, at least one Romance language is official in France , Portugal , Spain , Italy , Switzerland , Belgium , Romania , Moldova , Transnistria , Monaco , Andorra , San Marino and Vatican City . In these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Romansh and Catalan have constitutional official status. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of

352-471: Is a 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 of Eastern European Jewish origins. His father, a fish seller, was an immigrant from a town near Minsk , Byelorussian SSR (now Belarus ). He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later

396-731: Is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America , home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize ); and in Mexico . In the Caribbean , it is official in Cuba , the Dominican Republic , and Puerto Rico . In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish

440-422: Is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and other Italic languages , which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated

484-609: 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). After four years teaching at Columbia University (1966–1969), Matisoff accepted a professorship at Berkeley . At Berkeley, his research has encompassed a wide range of topics, from historical and comparative linguistics to tonal phenomena, variational semantics, language contact , Yiddish , and Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax. Before his retirement, he taught classes on

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528-1059: Is spoken by many residents of Alghero , on the island of Sardinia , and it is co-official in that city. Galician , with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia , and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León . A few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, Asturian and Aragonese in Spain; Mirandese in Portugal; Friulian , Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; and Romansh in Switzerland. The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as

572-491: Is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor . Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain , together with Spanish. Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec , and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario . Canada is officially bilingual , with French and English being

616-610: The European Union . Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct Latin Union ; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations . Outside Europe, French , Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires . With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish

660-553: The Latin or Neo-Latin languages , are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin . They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family . The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are: The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in

704-582: The Occitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman Empire , together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin

748-639: The Republic of Moldova , where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ( Vojvodina and the Bor District ), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ( Bukovina , Budjak ) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of

792-423: The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, an historical linguistics project aimed at producing an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field. The project maintains a large, publicly accessible lexical database of nearly one million records with data on Sino-Tibetan languages from over 500 sources. This database is used to identify and mark cognates for

836-417: The declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions . By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin . Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research

880-477: The 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and parts of Africa . Portuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas . There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. All of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of

924-669: The European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it). The term Romance derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice , "in Roman ", derived from romanicus : for instance, in the expression romanice loqui , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular ), contrasted with latine loqui , "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of

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968-534: The Linguistics of Southeast Asia, Tibeto-Burman Linguistics, Historical Semantics, Morphology, and Field Methods. In Field Methods, graduate students learn the methods of language description through eliciting data from a native speaker. The languages studied in Matisoff’s field methods classes in different years include: Lai Chin , Sherpa , and Uighur , among numerous others. He edited the journal Linguistics of

1012-688: The Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin. The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows: Catalan is the official language of Andorra . In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in Catalonia , the Valencian Community (under the name Valencian ), and the Balearic Islands , and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of Aragon known as La Franja . In addition, it

1056-520: The STEDT project were published in Matisoff's 2003 monograph Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction (HPTB). In 2008, Matisoff published a monograph on Proto-Tibeto-Burman reconstructions for reproductive system vocabulary. The final release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus was published in 2015 by Matisoff, with an online version also available. The STEDT Monograph Series, published by

1100-420: The STEDT project, has 10 books. 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 an American linguist. He is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley . He

1144-544: The Tibeto-Burman Area for many years (subsequently edited by his student Randy LaPolla , then by LaPolla's student Alec Coupe). Matisoff participated in establishing the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (abbreviated ICSTLL), an annual conference held since 1968. Matisoff has coined a number of terms used in linguistics, including tonogenesis , rhinoglottophilia , Sinosphere and Indosphere , Cheshirisation , which refers to

1188-540: The adoption of Latin. To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. With

1232-462: The criterion of mutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not. The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated genetic clades in a tree model . The Romance language most widely spoken natively today

1276-505: 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. Matisoff's doctoral dissertation

1320-464: The dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain , the Roman province of Africa , western Germany , Pannonia and the whole Balkans . During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with

1364-557: The end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia . In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya , Eritrea and Somalia —it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. Romania did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includes not only

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1408-578: The language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui , "to speak in Barbarian " (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice , or "in the Roman vernacular". Most of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been

1452-534: The most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea . Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic. It is currently spoken by a minority and taught in

1496-615: The official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti , French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II , its language did not remain official after

1540-584: The other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe. Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages ; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology , morphology , and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost

1584-584: The population in Italy , Spain , and Portugal . Romanian is also spoken in Israel by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. The Aromanian language is spoken today by Aromanians in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece. Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between

1628-568: The purposes of better understanding the historical development of the Sino-Tibetan language family and the subgroupings of the languages therein, and to reconstruct the theoretical proto-language of the language family, Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Matisoff has authored two monographs so far presenting results from the STEDT project: The Tibeto-Burman Reproductive System: Toward an Etymological Thesaurus (2008) and The Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (2003, 800 p.). Although Matisoff retired from Berkeley in 2002, he continues to publish extensively and

1672-549: The rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern , western , central , and southeastern Europe , and northern Africa along parts of western Asia . Latin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries. After that time and within two hundred years, it became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them." By

1716-434: The school curriculum. Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal , is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil , it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay . This accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in

1760-598: The trace remains of an otherwise disappeared sound in a word, and sesquisyllabic to describe the iambic stress pattern of words in languages spoken in Southeast Asia, such as the Mon–Khmer languages. In a 1990 paper criticizing Joseph Greenberg 's tendency to lump when classifying languages , Matisoff humorously coined the term columbicubiculomania (from columbi + cubiculo + mania ), which he defined as "a compulsion to stick things into pigeonholes , to leave nothing unclassified ." In 1987, Matisoff began

1804-465: The western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal , Spain , and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to

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1848-729: Was Principal Investigator for the STEDT project until its end in 2015. In 2015, the final print and software releases for STEDT were disseminated to the public, concluding the decades-long Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT). Romance languages Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Romance languages , also known as

1892-519: 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

1936-706: Was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Project members were known as "STEDTniks," and included Richard S. Cook , Zev J. Handel , Randy J. LaPolla , David Mortensen , Jackson Tianshin Sun , Jonathan P. Evans , Weera Ostapirat , Graham Thurgood , David Solnit , Kenneth VanBik , John B. Lowe ("J.B. Lowe"), Liberty Lidz, Daniel Bruhn, Dominic Yu, among other linguists. Preliminary results from

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