Weldon South Coblin, Jr. (born February 26, 1944) is an American Sinologist, linguist, and educator, best known for his studies of Chinese linguistics and Tibetan.

Life and career

Coblin attended the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

as an undergraduate student, graduating with a B.A. in Chinese in 1967. He then continued on at Washington as a graduate student under the Belgian Sinologist and

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

clergyman Fr. Paul Serruys, earning a Ph.D. in Chinese language and literature in 1972 with a dissertation entitled "An Introductory Study of Textual and Linguistic Problems in '' Erh-ya''". After completing his Ph.D., Coblin stayed at Washington for one year as a teaching associate, then in 1973 joined the faculty of the

University of Iowa The University of Iowa (U of I, UIowa, or Iowa) is a public university, public research university in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest and largest university in the state. The University of Iowa is organized int ...

, where he spent his entire career. Early in his career he made many important contributions to Tibetan and

Sino-Tibetan 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 ...

linguistics, but since the mid-1990s has worked primarily on alphabetic representations of Chinese. Starting around that time along with Jerry Norman he promoted a new direction in Chinese historical phonology making less use of the ''

Qieyun The ''Qieyun'' () is a Chinese rhyme dictionary that was published in 601 during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the '' fanqie'' method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The ' ...

'' and other rhyme books, and more use of the traditional

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards ...

. Coblin is an emeritus professor at the

Selected works

*Coblin, W. South (1972). "An Introductory Study of Textual and Linguistic Problems in ''Erh-ya''", Ph.D. dissertation (University of Washington). * "Notes on Tibetan Verbal Morphology," ''T'oung Pao'' 52 (1976), pp. 45–70. * * * * * * * * *

External links

W. South Coblin
The University of Iowa. {{DEFAULTSORT:Coblin, Weldon South 'Phags-pa script scholars American sinologists 1944 births University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences alumni University of Iowa faculty Living people