Speaker: ཡེ་ཤེས་འོད་གསལ་ཨ་ཚོགས། / Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs, Professor in Linguistics, Nankai University. Visiting Scholar, Harvard University (2023-2024)
Moderator: Lauran Hartley, Director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program; Associate Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Discussant: Ross Perlin, Linguist, Endangered Language Alliance; Adjunct Lecturer in Linguistics, Columbia University
The academic consensus has traditionally posited a shared historical origin between Tibetan and Chinese, constituting a significant aspect of the Sino-Tibetan Language hypothesis. However, recent research by Dr. Atshogs has challenged this notion, presenting alternative perspectives. He suggests that Proto-Chinese might have been a mixed language, with Chinese and Tibetan sharing only deep-seated historical connections in basic lexicon, whereas their grammatical systems may have come from different origins. Concurrently, he discovered that the morphological systems of Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman languages share a common historical origin with Altaic languages, terming it 'Tibeto-Altaic Grammatical Drift' (TAGD). This talk will discusses the major features and new evidences of TAGD, including systematical and regular sound correspondences between Tibeto-Burman languages and Altaic languages in terms of such grammatical categories as nominal gender, number and case, verbal tense, aspect and modality (TAM).
Speaker's Bio: Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs hails from Kham Tibet. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and serves as the Director of the Sino-Tibetan Language Research Center at Nankai University, China. He is also known as a Tibetan Buddhist clay sculptor and writer. Atshogs earned his Ph.D. from Nankai University in 2003 and served as a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo from 2006 to 2007 and the University of Maryland from 2013 to 2015. His linguistic studies have received several academic awards, including the Mantaro J. Hashimoto Award in 2004 for Chinese Historical Phonology from the International Association of Chinese Languages (IACL), the National Award for Outstanding 100 Doctoral Dissertations in China, and the Scientific Research Outstanding Achievement Award in Higher Education Institutions thrice from the Ministry of Education of China.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Modern Tibetan Studies Program.
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