Nathan Hill - Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies
Nathan Hill
Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies
I am Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies and currently the Director of Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. My research focusses on Asian languages and their history. My particular speciality is Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics. I have worked on the history of Chinese, Burmese, and, in particular, Tibetan. I am also endeavor to applying cutting edge technologies, both to the study of Asian languages, and to enabling speakers of minority languages to fully enjoy the benefits of technology advances.
What I teach
- I primarily contribute teaching to the MPhil in Chinese Studies, but plan to teach more general historical linguistics in future years.
What I research
- Comparative and historical linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan family, especially the historical phonology of Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese.
- Old Tibetan philology and descriptive grammar.
- Computational linguistics and natural language processing of Asian minority languages.
- Professor Hill researches Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics.
- The typology of evidential systems.
- History of Linguistics.
Recent Publications
- Hill, Nathan W. (2019) The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hill, Nathan W. and List, Johann-Mattis (2019) 'Using Chinese Character Formation Graphs to Test Proposals in Chinese Historical Phonology'. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, (12) 2, pp 186-200.
- Hill, Nathan W. (2019) 'The prefix g- and -o- ablaut in Tibetan present verb stems'. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, (12) 2, pp 229-236.
- Fellner, Hannes and Hill, Nathan W. (2019) 'Word families, allofams, and the comparative method'. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, (48) 2, pp 91-124.