Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology and

Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 ...

. Bodman was born in Chicago in 1913. He entered

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...

in 1935, but left after one year and spent several years doing office work and traveling in Europe. He joined the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the naval warfare, maritime military branch, service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is the world's most powerful navy with the largest Displacement (ship), displacement, at 4.5 millio ...

in 1941, and was assigned to Station HYPO at

Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor is an American lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. It was often visited by the naval fleet of the United States, before it was acquired from the Hawaiian Kingdom by the U.S. with the signing of the Reci ...

in early 1942 to join the team working to decipher Japanese naval codes. He retired from the navy in 1945 with the rank of Lieutenant commander. After leaving the navy, Bodman enrolled at

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., with a study of the phonology of the '' Shiming''. While at Yale he was a student of Li Fang-Kuei, who was a visiting professor there at the time. He worked at the

Foreign Service Institute The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States federal government's primary training institution for members of the U.S. foreign service community, preparing American diplomats as well as other professionals to advance U.S. foreign ...

from 1950 until 1962, rising to head to the Department of Far Eastern languages. Between 1951 and 1952, he was in Malaya on loan to the British government, where he created a course on

Hokkien Hokkien ( , ) is a Varieties of Chinese, variety of the Southern Min group of Chinese language, Chinese languages. Native to and originating from the Minnan region in the southeastern part of Fujian in southeastern China, it is also referred ...

that is still a definitive reference. In 1962, Bodman joined the faculty of

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

, where he stayed until his retirement in 1979. He continued to do fieldwork on

Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people spe ...

and Min dialects. In an unpublished paper presented at Princeton in 1971, he proposed a novel six-vowel system for a stage of Chinese prior to the

Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...

of the earliest records. This system was later developed as a proposal for Old Chinese itself by Bodman's student William Baxter, and independently by

Sergei Starostin Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (; March 24, 1953 – September 30, 2005) was a Russian historical linguistics, historical linguist and philology, philologist, perhaps best known for his reconstructions of hypothetical proto-languages, including hi ...

and Zhengzhang Shangfang, and is now widely accepted. He marshaled his ideas on Old Chinese and its relationship with Sino-Tibetan in an influential treatment published in 1980. Later he published a series of papers reconstructing the history of the Min group.

Publications

* * ** adapted with dialogues rewritten by Wu Su-chu as ''Spoken Taiwanese'', Spoken Language Services, 1983. . * *

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Bodman, Nicholas C. 1913 births 1997 deaths Yale College alumni American sinologists Cornell University faculty Writers from Chicago Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages Linguists of Chinese 20th-century American linguists Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni