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Professor Nathan Hill
Professor in Chinese Studies, C.L.C.S.

Publications and Further Research Outputs

Peer-Reviewed Publications

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Blum, Frederic; Juárez, Cristian, Grouping sounds into evolving units for the purpose of historical language comparison, Open Research Europe, 4, (31), 2024, p1-11 Journal Article, 2024 DOI

Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 72, (2024), Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan; Faggionato, Christian Journal, 2024 TARA - Full Text

Baley, Julien; Hill, Nathan W.; Caldwell, Ernest, Chinese Transcription of Buddhist Terms in the Late Hàn Dynasty, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9, (10), 2023, p1-8 Journal Article, 2023 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., A Tibetan Passive Construction in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Bulletin of Tibetology, 54, (1), 2023, p213-228 Journal Article, 2023

Hill, Nathan W., Developing an NLP pipeline to Tibetan and Newar corpus creation with an emphasis on the syntax-pragmatics interface, Building bridges through Applied Linguistics, Munster Technological University, 30 Sept - 1 Oct, 2023 Oral Presentation, 2023

Origin of the r- allomorph of the Tibetan causative s- in, editor(s)Kurtis Schaeffer, William McGrath, and Jue Liang , Histories of Tibet: Essays in honor of Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, New York, Wisdom Publications, 2023, pp106-114 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2023

Hill, Nathan W., Andrew B. Liu: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asia Institute of Columbia University.) xi, 360 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. $50. ISBN 978 0 30024373 4., Review of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Liu , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 86, (1), 2023, p198-200 Review, 2023 TARA - Full Text DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Making and agreeing to requests in Old Tibetan, Himalayan Linguistics, 21, (1), 2023, p29-39 Journal Article, 2023 TARA - Full Text

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Forkel, Robert; Blum, Frederic, Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction, 4th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2023, Singapore, 2023, 2023 Oral Presentation, 2023 TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., An Indological Transcription of Middle Chinese, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 52, (1), 2023, p40-50 Journal Article, 2023 DOI

Baley, Julien; Hill, Nathan W., Mechanizing historical phonology, The Sixth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology,, Edinburgh, Scotland, 4-5 December 2023, 2023 Oral Presentation, 2023

Li, Shihua; Hill, Nathan W., Printed Text Recognition for Lexical Lists in Chinese-International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Glossing, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9, (15), 2023, p1-8 Journal Article, 2023 TARA - Full Text DOI

O'Neill, Alexander James; Hill, Nathan W., Text Recognition for Nepalese Manuscripts in Pracalit Script, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 8, (26), 2022, p1-6 Journal Article, 2022 TARA - Full Text DOI

Two notes on Tibetan reg 'shave' in, editor(s)Katarzyna Marciniak, Stanislaw Jan Kania, Malgorzata Wielislawa-Soltwedel, and Agata Bareja-Starzynska , Guruparampara: Studies on Buddhism, India, Tibet, and more in honour of Professor Marek Mejor, Warsaw, University of Warsaw Press, 2022, pp157-160 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2022

List, Johann-Mattis; Vylomova, Ekaterina; Forkel, Robert; Hill, Nathan W.; Cotterell, Ryan D., The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2022), 2022, p52 - 62 Journal Article, 2022 TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., The e-grade in Tibetan Honorifics, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 15, 2022, p479-483 Journal Article, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Accusative alignment in the Old Tibetan switch reference system, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 4, (2), 2022, p300-311 Journal Article, 2022 TARA - Full Text

Worin besteht der Unterschied zwischen Präskription und Superskription in der tibetischen Orthographie in, editor(s)Christoph Cüppers, Karl-Heinz Everding, and Peter Schwieger , Life in Tibetan Studies: Festschrift for Dieter Schuh on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, Lumbini, Lumbini International Research Institute, 2022, pp217-229 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2022

List, Johann-Mattis; Forkel, Robert; Hill, Nathan W., Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns, 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2022 (LChange'22), Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, 28 May 2022, 2022 Conference Paper, 2022

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Forkel, Robert, A New Framework for Fast Automated Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2022, Dublin, 2022, pp89-96 Conference Paper, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Two notes on Proto-Ersuic, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 51, (1), 2022, p105-114 Journal Article, 2022 DOI TARA - Full Text

Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 14, 1, (2021), Hill, Nathan W.; Lai Yunfan Journal, 2021

Hill, Nathan; Lai Yunfan, Introduction to BCL Forum: Research of PRC scholars on selected topics in Chinese historical linguistics, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 14, (1), 2021, p55-56 Journal Article, 2021 DOI

ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20, 2, (2021), Special issue on Tibetan NLPp, Hill, Nathan W.; Long Congjun Journal, 2021

Meelen, Marieke; Roux, Élie; Hill, Nathan W., Optimisation of the Largest Annotated Tibetan Corpus Combining Rule-based, Memory-based, and Deep-learning Methods, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20, (1), 2021, p1-11 Journal Article, 2021 TARA - Full Text DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The Envoys of Phywa to Dmu (PT 126), Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 60, 2021, p84-143 Journal Article, 2021 TARA - Full Text URL

Adams, Oliver; Galliot, Benjamin; Wisniewski, Guillaume; Lambourne, Nicholas; Foley, Ben; Sanders-Dwyer, Rahasya; Wiles, Janet; Michaud, Alexis; Guillaume, Séverine; Besacier, Laurent; Cox, Christopher; Aplonova, Katya; Jacques, Guillaume; Hill, Nathan W., User-Friendly Automatic Transcription of Low-Resource Languages: Plugging ESPnet into Elpis, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 2021, p51-62 Journal Article, 2021 URL DOI

Scholarship on Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) languages of South East Asia in, editor(s)Paul Sidwell and Mathias Jenny , The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2021, pp111-138 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2021 URL TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque, Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque: Egophoricity, Linguistic Typology, 24, (1), 2020, p201-208 Review Article, 2020 TARA - Full Text DOI

Wu, Mei-Shin; Schweikhard, Nathanael E.; Bodt, Timotheus A.; Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the Art, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 6, (2), 2020, p1-14 Journal Article, 2020 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., The prefix g- and -o- ablaut in Tibetan present verb stems, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 12, (2), 2020, p229-236 Journal Article, 2020 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Using Chinese Character Formation Graphs to Test Proposals in Chinese Historical Phonology, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 12, (2), 2020, p186-200 Journal Article, 2020 TARA - Full Text DOI

Dugdak, Sonam; Hill, Nathan W., 'Share the sweets', An introspective analysis of copulas following adjectives in Modern Standard Tibetan, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 52, 2019, p185-192 Journal Article, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan zero nominalization, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 48, 2019, p5-9 Journal Article, 2019 TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., Some Philological Remarks on PT 126 'The Envoys of Phywa to Dmu', The 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Inalco, Paris, 7-13 July 2019, 2019 Oral Presentation, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019 Book, 2019 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The Derivation of the Tibetan Present Prefix g- from v - Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 72, (3), 2019, p325-332 Journal Article, 2019 DOI

Fellner, Hannes A.; Hill, Nathan W., The differing status of reconstruction in Trans-Himalayan and Indo-European, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 48, (2), 2019, p159-172 Journal Article, 2019 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan, Why does Tibetan stack its letters?, 8th International Conference of Oriental Studies: Challenges of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Approaches, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland, 24-25 Nov 2019, 2019 Oral Presentation, 2019

Fellner, Hannes; Hill, Nathan W., A comparison of allofams in Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European, The 52nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL52), University of Sydney, 24-26 June 2019, 2019 Oral Presentation, 2019

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Foster, Christopher, Towards a standardized annotation of rhyme judgments in Chinese historical phonology (and beyond), Journal of Language Relationship, 17, (1), 2019, p26-43 Journal Article, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., Toward a computational implementation of the traditional comparative method, International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 1-5 July 2019, 2019 Oral Presentation, 2019

Fellner, Hannes A.; Hill, Nathan W., Word families, allofams, and the comparative method, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 48, (2), 2019, p91-124 Journal Article, 2019 DOI TARA - Full Text

Miyake, Marc; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Pyu inscriptions of early Burma, 7th International Conference of Oriental Studies: Collections of Texts and Artefacts, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Krakow, Poland, 22-24 Oct 2018, 2018 Oral Presentation, 2018

Fellner, Hannes A.; Gunkel, Dieter; Hill, Nathan W., À cheval donné on regarde les dents. The Indo-European origin of the Trans-Himalayan words for 'horse', International Colloquium on Loanwords and Substrata in Indo-European languages, Limoges, France, 4-7 June 2018, 2018 Oral Presentation, 2018

Meelen, Marieke, Hill, Nathan W., Segmenting and POS tagging Classical Tibetan using a memory-based tagger, Himalayan Linguistics, 16, (2), 2018, p64 - 89 Journal Article, 2018 DOI

Miles, James; Miyake, Marc; Hill, Nathan W., The use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging in the recording and analyses of Burmese Pyu inscriptions, Archaeological Research in Asia, 16, 2018, p130-138 Journal Article, 2018 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Schiefner's conjecture: origins of proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants, 227th Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society, Los Angeles, USA, 17 Mar 2017, 2017 Oral Presentation, 2017

Gawne, Lauren; Hill, Nathan W., Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017 Book, 2017

Yukawa Yasutoshi, 'Lhasa Tibetan predicates', Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017, - 187-224 Translation, 2017

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W., The Sino-Tibetan language family: What we know, what we can know, and what we know we cannot know, 33. Deutscher Orientalistentag: Asien, Afrika und Europa, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany., 18-22 Sept 2017, 2017 Oral Presentation, 2017

Perfect experiential constructions: the inferential semantics of direct evidence in, editor(s)Lauren Gawne and Nathan W. Hill , Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2017, pp131-159 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2017 DOI

Nishi Yoshio, 'Old Burmese ry- a Remark on Proto-Lolo-Burmese Resonant Initials', 2017, - 1-10 Translation, 2017 Handle

Hill, Nathan W., Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, eds, The state of Sino-Tibetan, Archiv Orientalni, 85, (2), 2017, p305-315 Review Article, 2017

The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality in, editor(s)Lauren Gawne and Nathan W. Hill , Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017, pp1--38 , [Hill, Nathan W. and Gawne, Lauren] Book Chapter, 2017 DOI

Simon, Walter (1893-1981) in, editor(s)Rint Sybesma, Wolfgang Behr, Yueguo Gu, Zev Handel, C.-T. James Huang, and James Myers , Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, Leiden, Brill, 2017, pp100-102 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Review of Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart , Archiv orientalni, 85, (1), 2017, p135-140 Review, 2017

Hill, Nathan W., Songs of the Bailang: A New Transcription with Etymological Commentary, Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 103, (1), 2017, p386-429 Journal Article, 2017 TARA - Full Text URL DOI

The lexicography of Tibetan in, editor(s)Patrick Hanks and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver , International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, Berlin, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017, pp1-11 , [Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward] Book Chapter, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan first person singular pronouns, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, 70, (2), 2017, p161-169 Journal Article, 2017 TARA - Full Text

List, Johann-Mattis; Pathmanathan, Jananan Sylvestre; Hill, Nathan W.; Bapteste, Eric; Lopez, Philippe, Vowel purity and rhyme evidence in Old Chinese reconstruction, Lingua Sinica, 3, (1), 2017 Journal Article, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., A refutation of Song's (2014) explanation of the 'stop coda problem' in Old Chinese, International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 3, (2), 2016, p270-281 Journal Article, 2016 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., The Evidence for Chinese *-r, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 9, (2), 2016, p190-204 Journal Article, 2016 DOI TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan *-as > -os, International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Reconstruction, 12, 2016, p163-173 Journal Article, 2016 TARA - Full Text

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan reg 'shave' (an exception to Dempsey's law), 14th International Association for Tibetan Studies, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway, 19-25 June 2016, 2016 Oral Presentation, 2016

Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- an Old Tibetan mythic formula., Zentralasiatische Studien, 45, 2016, p203-216 Journal Article, 2016

Nishi Yoshio, 'Proto-Lolo-Burmese and Old Burmese Sources of Written Burmese -ac', 2016, - 97-129 Translation, 2016

Himalayan Linguistics, 15, 2, (2016), Special issue on Tibetan NLPp, Hill, Nathan W.; Di Jiang Journal, 2016

Languages: Tibetan in, editor(s)Jonathan A. Silk, Richard Bowring, Vincent Eltschinger and Michael Radich , Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Leiden, Brill, 2015, pp917-924 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., The sku bla Rite in Imperial Tibetan Religion, Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 24, (1), 2015, p49-58 Journal Article, 2015 URL DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Hare lõ: the touchstone of mirativity, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 13, (2), 2015, p24-31 Journal Article, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., Proposal for a transcription of Chinese characters in the study of early Chinese language and literature., Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 8, (1), 2015, p48-60 Journal Article, 2015 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan phonological innovations, 48th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 21-23 Aug 2015, 2015 Oral Presentation, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., Origins and Migrations in the Extended Eastern Himalayas. Edited by Toni Huber and Stuart Blackburn. Leiden, Brill, 2012., Review of Origins and Migrations in the Extended Eastern Himalayas, by Toni Huber and Stuart Blackburn, eds. , Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 25, (2), 2015, p366-368 Review, 2015 DOI

Some Tibetan first person plural inclusive pronouns in, editor(s)Hanna Havnevik and Charles Ramble , From Bhakti to Bon, Oslo, Novus, 2015, pp242-248 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan part-of-speech conundrums: mang and yun ring, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, 68, (2), 2015, p65-72 Journal Article, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., The pre-history of Old Chinese, 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy, 27-31 July 2015, 2015 Oral Presentation, 2015

Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Kilgarriff, Adam; Vadlapudi, Ravikiran; Zadoks, Abel, The contribution of corpus linguistics to lexicography and the future of Tibetan dictionaries, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 32, 2015, p51-86 Journal Article, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of Tangut to Trans-Himalayan comparative linguistics, Archiv orientalni, 83, (1), 2015, p187-200 Review Article, 2015

Tibetan in, editor(s)Nicola Grandi and Livia Kortvelyessy , Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp381 - 388, [Simon, Camille; Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., Some Tibetan verb forms that violate Dempsey's law, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 29, 2014, p99-109 Journal Article, 2014

Sino-Tibetan in, editor(s)Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Stekauer , The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp609-650 , [Chung, Karen Steffen; Hill, Nathan W.; Sun, Jackson T.-S.] Book Chapter, 2014 DOI

Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Zadoks, Abel, A rule-based part-of-speech tagger for Classical Tibetan, Himalayan Linguistics, 13, (2), 2014, p9-57 Journal Article, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Inferential semantics of direct evidence: 'Lhasa' Tibetan bzhag and Kham oleo, 24th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Yangon University, Burma, 27-31 May 2014, 2014 Oral Presentation, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., A typological perspective on Classical Mongolian indirect speech, Central Asiatic Journal, 56, 2014, p11-18 Journal Article, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Grammatically Conditioned Sound Change, Language and Linguistics Compass, 8, (6), 2014, p211-229 Journal Article, 2014 DOI

A Gter ma of negatives. H.E. Richardson's photographic negatives of manuscript copies of Tibetan imperial inscriptions possibly collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu in the 18th century CE, recently found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford in, editor(s)Kurt Tropper , Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-modern Buddhist World. Proceedings of the Eponymous Conference Held in Vienna, 14-15 Oct. 2011, Vienna, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, 2014, pp83-115 , [Hill, Nathan W.; Manson, Charles] Book Chapter, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., A Note on Voicing Alternation In The Tibetan Verbal System, Transactions of the Philological Society, 112, (1), 2014, p1-4 Journal Article, 2014 DOI

Tibeto-Burman *dz- > Tibetan z- and related proposals in, editor(s)Richard VanNess Simmons and Newell Ann Van Auken , Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics, Taipei, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2014, pp167-178 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Cognates of Old Chinese *-n, *-r, and *-j in Tibetan and Burmese, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 43, (2), 2014, p91-109 Journal Article, 2014 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Proto-Kuki-Chin initials according to Toru Ohno and Kenneth VanBik, Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 7, 2014, p11-30 Journal Article, 2014

Owen-Smith, Thomas; Hill, Nathan W., Trans-Himalayan Linguistics, Berlin, de Gruyter Mouton, 2013 Book, 2013 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Three notes on Laufer's law, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 36, (1), 2013, p57-72 Journal Article, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Relative chronology of Burmese sound changes, 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Universitetet i Oslo, Norway, 5-9 Aug 2013, 2013 Oral Presentation, 2013

Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho, 'Love poems of the sixth Dalai Lama', Sources of the Tibetan Tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, - 557-559 Translation, 2013

Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Zadoks, Abel, Disambiguating Tibetan verb stems with matrix verbs in the indirect infinitive construction, Bulletin of Tibetology, 49, (2), 2013, p35-44 Journal Article, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Old Chinese *sm- and the Old Tibetan Word for `Fire', Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 42, (1), 2013, p60-71 Journal Article, 2013 DOI

Introduction in, Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2013, pp1-10 , [Owen-Smith, Tom and Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2013

The emergence of the pluralis majestatis and the relative chronology of Old Tibetan texts in, editor(s)Franz-Karl Ehrhard and Petra Maurer , Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe for Christoph Cüppers, Andiast, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2013, pp249-262 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Contextual semantics of 'Lhasa' Tibetan evidentials, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 10, (3), 2013, p47-54 Journal Article, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Mark Turin: A Grammar of the Thangmi Language: with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture. (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region.) xxxvii, 958 pp. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. €169. ISBN 978 90 04 15526 8., Review of A Grammar of the Thangmi Language: with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, by Mark Turin , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 76, (1), 2013, p148-150 Review, 2013 DOI

A new interpretation of the mythological incipit of the Rkong po inscription in, editor(s)Tropper, Kurt and Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina , Tibetan Inscriptions, Leiden, Brill, 2013, pp171-182 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2013 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Rituals of state and the envoys of Phywa to Dmu, 13th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 21-27 July 2013, 2013 Oral Presentation, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Relative ordering of Tibetan sound changes affecting laterals, Language and Linguistics, 14, (1), 2013, p193-209 Journal Article, 2013

Hill, Nathan, Sam Van Schaik: Tibet: A History. xxiii, 324 pp. London and New York: Yale University Press, 2011. £25. ISBN 978 0 300 15404 7., Review of Tibet: A History, by Sam Van Schaik , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75, (1), 2012, p190-192 Review, 2012 DOI

Hill, Nathan, W., Tibetan-las, -nas and -bas, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 41, (1), 2012, p3-38 Journal Article, 2012 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Evolution of the Burmese Vowel System, Transactions of the Philological Society, 110, (1), 2012, p64-79 Journal Article, 2012 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., A note on the history and future of the 'Wylie' system, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 23, 2012, p103-105 Journal Article, 2012

Hill, Nathan W., The six vowel hypothesis of Old Chinese in comparative Context, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 6, (2), 2012, p1-69 Journal Article, 2012 DOI

Introduction in, editor(s)Nathan W. Hill , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp1-4 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2012

Hill, Nathan W., Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012 Book, 2012 DOI

Tibetan Palatalization and the gy versus g.y Distinction in, editor(s)Hill, Nathan W. , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp383-398 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2012 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., 'Mirativity' does not exist: hdug in 'Lhasa' Tibetan and other suspects, Linguistic Typology, 16, (3), 2012, p389-433 Journal Article, 2012 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Multiple origins of Tibetan o, Language and Linguistics, 12, (3), 2011, p707-721 Journal Article, 2011

The allative, locative, and terminative cases (la-don) in the Old Tibetan Annals in, editor(s)Imaeda Yoshiro and Mathew Kapstein , Studies on Old Tibetan Documents, Tokyo, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studie, 2011, pp3-38 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax by Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler. Leiden: Brill, 2011., Review of Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax, by Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler, eds. , European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 39, 2011, p200-206 Review, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., Alternances entre v et b en tibétain ancien et dans les langues tibétaines modernes, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 20, 2011, p115-122 Journal Article, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., North East Indian Linguistics: volume 3, Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, and Mark W. Post, eds. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., 2011., Review of North East Indian Linguistics: volume 3, by Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, and Mark W. Post, eds. , European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 40, 2011, p134-138 Review, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 21, (4), 2011, p441-457 Journal Article, 2011 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Sommerschuh, Christine, Einführung in die tibetische Schriftsprache: Lehrbuch für den Unterricht und das vertiefende Selbststudium, Indo-Iranian Journal, 53, (3), 2010, p251-264 Review, 2010 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, Review of Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, by Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, eds. , China Review International, 16, (2), 2010, p185-189 Review, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., A note on the phonetic evolution of yod-pa-red in central Tibet, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 33, (1), 2010, p93-94 Journal Article, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., A new interpretation of the mythological incipit of the Rkong-po inscription, 12th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 15-21 Aug 2010, 2010 Oral Presentation, 2010

Hill, Nathan. W., A Lexicon of Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition, Munich, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010 Book, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., Christine Sommerschuh, Einfuehrung in die tibetische Schriftsprache: Lehrbuch fuer den Unterricht und das vertiefende Selbststudium by Christine Sommerschuh. Nordstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2008., Indo-Iranian Journal, 53, (3), 2010, p251-264 Review Article, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., Buddhism and Empire. By Michael Walter. pp. xxvii, 311. Leiden, Brill, 2009., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 20, (4), 2010, p559-562 Review, 2010 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., An overview of Old Tibetan synchronic phonology, Transactions of the Philological Society, 108, (2), 2010, p110-125 Journal Article, 2010 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Personal pronouns in Old Tibetan, Journal Asiatique, 298, (2), 2010, p549-571 Journal Article, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., The converb -las in Old Tibetan, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 73, (2), 2010, p245-260 Journal Article, 2010 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan as a plain initial and its place in Old Tibetan phonology, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 32, (1), 2009, p115-140 Journal Article, 2009

Iwao, Kazushi; Hill, Nathan W.; Takeuchi, Tsuguhito, Old Tibetan Inscriptions, Tokyo, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2009 Book, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., James A. Matisoff, Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction by James A. Matisoff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003., Language and Linguistics, 10, (1), 2009, p173-195 Review Article, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (review), China Review International, 16, (2), 2009, p185-189 Review, 2009 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The Hphags-pa letter v- and laryngeal phenomena in Mongolian and Chinese, Central Asiatic Journal, 52, (2), 2009, p183-205 Journal Article, 2009

Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho, 'Love poems of the sixth Dalai Lama', 2008, - 80-91 Translation, 2008

Hill, Nathan W., Alternances entre h et b en tibétain ancien et dans les langues tibétaines modernes, XXIIe Journeés de Linguistique de l'Asie Orientale, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 9-10 June 2008, 2008 Oral Presentation, 2008

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan palatalization and the gy versus g.y distinction, Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages Symposium IV, SOAS University of London, 16 Sept 2008, 2008 Oral Presentation, 2008

Verba moriendi in the Old Tibetan Annals in, editor(s)Christopher Beckwith , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages III, Halle, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2008, pp71-86 , [Hill, Nathan W.] Book Chapter, 2008

Michael Hahn, 'Foundational questions of Tibetan morphology', 2008, - 3-19 Translation, 2008

Pa tshab pa sangs dbang 'dus, 'An introduction to the text of the newly discovered Khrom chen stele', 2007, - 3-9 Translation, 2007

Hill, Nathan W., Aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants in Old Tibetan, Language and Linguistics, 8, (2), 2007, p471-493 Journal Article, 2007

Hill, Nathan W., Personalpronomina in der Lebensbeschreibung des Mi la ras pa, Kapitel III, Zentralasiatische Studien, 36, 2007, p277-287 Journal Article, 2007

Hill, Nathan W., Verbs for death in the Old Tibetan Annals, 11th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Königswinter, Germany, 27 Aug - 2 Sept 2006, 2006 Oral Presentation, 2006

anonymous, 'The Old Tibetan Chronicle: chapter 1', 2006, - 89-101 Translation, 2006

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan vwa 'fox' and the sound change Tibeto-Burman *wa -> Old Tibetan o, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 19, (2), 2006, p75-90 Journal Article, 2006

Hill, Nathan W., The verb 'bri 'to write' in Old Tibetan, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 68, 2005, p177-182 Journal Article, 2005

Hill, Nathan W., Once more on the letter v - Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 28, (2), 2005, p111-141 Journal Article, 2005

Hill, Nathan W., Aspirate and non-aspirate voiceless stops in Old Tibetan, 11th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 6-9 Dec 2005, 2005 Oral Presentation, 2005

Hill, Nathan W., Compte rendu de Paul G. Hackett, 'A Tibetan Verb Lexicon', Revue d'études Tibétaines, 6, 2004, p78-98 Review Article, 2004

Hill, Nathan W., The inclusive/exclusive distinction in Middle Tibetan, 37th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Lunds Universitet, Sweden, 1-3 Oct 2004, 2004 Oral Presentation, 2004

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

Hill, Nathan W., Competing perspectives on the reconstruction of uvulars in Old Chinese, University of Cambridge, 6 Mar 2024, 2024 Invited Talk, 2024

Hill, Nathan W.; Shrestha, Sanyukta; O'Neill, Alexander James, Diaspora Kathmandu Newar 2019, 1, Zenodo, 2024 Dataset, 2024 DOI

Flanagan, Lughaidh; Liu, Xinyu; Hill, Nathan W., Selection of Han dynasty paronomastic glosses, 11, Zenodo, 2024 Dataset, 2024 DOI

Engels, James; Robert Barnett; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Hill, Nathan W., 'Transkribus_utils: Paragraph Extractor', 2024, - Software, 2024 DOI

Engels, James; Barnett, Robert; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Hill, Nathan W., 'Tibetan_tokenizers: botok_tokenizer.py', 2024, - Software, 2024 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Understanding ablaut in the Tibetan verb, University of Hamburg, 26 June 2024, 2024 Invited Talk, 2024

Hill, Nathan W., Reconstruction of " h" `tiger' in Old Chinese, Xiamen University, 24 Nov 2023, 2023 Invited Talk, 2023

Schuessler, Axel; Hill, Nathan, Selection of Han dynasty transcriptions of foreign names and words, 1, Zenodo, 2023 Dataset, 2023 DOI

Engels, James; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Barnett, Robert; Hill, Nathan W., 'Tibetan for Spacy 1.1', 2023, - Software, 2023 DOI

Hill, Nathan W.; Baley, Julien, Graph theory approaches to Buddhist transcriptional Chinese, Advanced Computational Methods for Studying Buddhist Texts, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 27 April 2023, 2023 Invited Talk, 2023

Hill, Nathan W., Chinese Historical Linguistics in the West, Xiamen University, 23 Nov 2023, 2023 Invited Talk, 2023

Meelen, Marieke; Faggianato, Christian; Hill, Nathan W., Introducing the research project 'The Emergence of Egophoricity' with a case study of the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Typology of evidential systems, Inalco, Paris, 25 February 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Making and Agreeing to Requests in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Tsinghua University, 6 May 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Knights, Seth; Xun, Gong; Hill, Nathan W., Materials for an Etymological Dictionary of Burmish 2.0, 1, Zenodo, 2022 Dataset, 2022 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Marx's theory of absolute rent and its role in explaining the divergence of prices from values, Irish Institute for Chinese Studies, University College Dublin, 10 March 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan switch-reference subject marking and evidentiality, Person Marking in Tibeto-Burman, University of Cologne, 12 Dec 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., The syntax of subordination with verba dicendi matrix verbs in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Linguistics Research Seminar, TCD, 21 Sept 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Relative chronology of some Bola sound changes, First Boya Linguistic Forum, Peking University, 15-16 Oct 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., Does Tibetan have a passive voice?, Sixth Sino-Tibetan Research Methodology Workshop (STLLRMW 2022), Nankai University, Tianjin, 16 Aug 2022, 2022 Invited Talk, 2022

Hill, Nathan W., How the Horse (") and Chariot (") Came to China, 2021 Annual Conference of MU Chinese Studies Chinese Language and Culture in Ireland: New Developments and Challenges, Maynooth University, 30 October 2021, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Hill, Nathan W., The Chinese state's approach to the national question in the 20th century, Centre for Asia-Pacific Research, University College Dublin, 25 November 2021, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Hill, Nathan W., Applying NLP to Buddhist Textual Criticism, International Symposium on Eurasian and Buddhist Philology in Memoriam of Professor Tschen Yin-Koh, Tsinghua University, PRC, October 15-17, 2021, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Faggionato, Christian; Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Rode, Samyo; Solmsdorf, Nikolai; Wangyal, Sonam, Classical Tibetan corpus annotated for verb-argument dependency relations, 1, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Horváth, Csilla; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Mansi texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Barnett, Robert ; Hill, Nathan W.; Diemberger, Hildegard; Samdrup, Tsering, Named-Entity Recognition for Modern Tibetan Newspapers: Tagset, Guidelines and Training Data, 1, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., (2021), 'Digitising Tibetan texts: a new resource for learners, teachers and Buddhist practitioners' [pdf], SOAS University of London, Research Excellence Framework 2021 Impact Case Study, 2021 URL

Hill, Nathan W., How Chinese used to sound: the challenges of an opaque writing system in the study of historical phonology, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Netherlands, 20 July 2021, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Zhou, Yulou; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of North Tujia (Bifzivsar) vocabulary and textual passages for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The transformation of exploitation into profit: a sticky point in Marxist economics, Department of Asian Studies, University College Cork, Ireland, 23 November 2021, 2021 Invited Talk, 2021

Hall, Elie; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Muak Sa-aak (duai: muak see aak) vocabulary and texts for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Akha, Ghoemeh; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Akha vocabulary and texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2021 Dataset, 2021 DOI

Watkins, Justin; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Wa texts and a Wa wordlist (PRC orthography) for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The Past and Future of Chinese Historical Phonology: Philology, Reconstruction, and Network Theory, Oxford Centre for Chinese Studies, 27 Feb 2020, 2020 Invited Talk, 2020

Yliniemi, Juha; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Drenjong texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W.; Cooper, Douglas, A machine readable collection of lexical data on the Burmish languages, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Chungli Ao Naga texts and wordlists for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Chongloi, Thangcha; Hill, Nathan W., Thadou texs and wordlists for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Du, Wenjiu; Hill, Nathan W., A Zhuang wordlist and Zhuang texts for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Worin besteht der Unterschied zwischen Präskription und Superskription in der tibetischen Orthographie, Abteilung für Mongolistik und Tibetstudien, Universität Bonn, 19 Feb 2020, 2020 Invited Talk, 2020

Maung, U Nyein; Lewis-Wong, Jennifer; Zaw, Khin Khin; McCormick, Patrick; Hill, Nathan W., A Structured Corpus of Old Burmese Stone Inscriptions, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W.; Nattier, Jan; Granger, Kelsey; Kollmeier, Florian, Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of An Shigao and Lokaksema, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Watkins, Justin; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Wa texts and a Wa wordlist (Bible orthography) for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020 Dataset, 2020 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., The difference between sngon-hjug and mgo-can consonants in Old Tibetan phonotactics, Research Institute for Chinese Minority Languages, Central University of Nationalities, 19 Dec 2019, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., Major problems in Sino-Tibetan comparative studies, School of Chinese Classics, Renmin University of China, 24 Dec 2019, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., Major changes in Tibetan historical phonology, School of Chinese Classics, Renmin University of China, 18 Dec 2019, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., The application of network theory to Chinese historical phonology: rhymes, xiesheng, and fanqie, School of Literature, Renmin University of China, 25 Dec 2019, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., A look at Kanjur stemmatics on the basis of recent discoveries. Two passages in the Vinayaksudrakavastu concerning shaving, Institut für Südasien- Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde, University of Vienna, 3 May 2019, 2019 Invited Talk, 2019

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan literacy, orthographic practices, and language attitudes: Reflections on priorities in research and documentation, Linguistic Documentation and Sustainability in Tibetan Minority Communities, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 20 Aug 2015, 2018 Invited Talk, 2018

Hill, Nathan W., Pyu Inscriptions of Early Burma, Sino-Tibetan Languages: History and Structure, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena, 8 Nov 2018, 2018 Invited Talk, 2018

Hill, Nathan W., A cognate bestiary, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 5 Dec 2018, 2018 Invited Talk, 2018

Hill, Nathan W., The Age of Ablaut in the Tibetan verbal system, Li Fang-Kuei Society Young Scholars Symposium, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 12-13 Aug 2018, 2018 Invited Talk, 2018

List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W., Data management in the reconstruction of proto-Burmish, Data management in Asian Humanities and Social Sciences, SOAS, University of London, 13-14 Nov 2017, 2017 Oral Presentation, 2017

Hill, Nathan W., The dark art of Chinese historical phonology: between philology and comparative reconstruction, Universität Wien, Austria, 5 May 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward, A part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus of Classical Tibetan, 1, Zenodo, 2017 Dataset, 2017 DOI

Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan W.; Handy, Christopher, The Annotated Corpus of Classical Tibetan (ACTib), Part II - POS-tagged version, based on the BDRC digitised text collection, tagged with the Memory-Based Tagger from TiMBL, 1, Zenodo, 2017 Dataset, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis "The Reconstruction of Proto-Burmish: A case study in the computational implementation of the comparative method, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, 27 Apr 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward, A part-of-speech (POS) lexicon of Classical Tibetan for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2017 Dataset, 2017 DOI

Gunkel, Dieter; Fellner, Hannes; Hill, Nathan W., *áruant- 'steed', an Indo-Iranian loan into Trans-Himalayan, Sino-Tibetan Exchanges: Routes, Goods, and Trade, Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC, 21-22 Oct 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Quantitative pattern analysis as an aid to discovering regular sound change: a case study from the Burmish languages, The regularity principle in sound change: Approaching the Neogrammarian controversy in the 21st century., University of Cologne, Germany, 20-21 July 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W., Decipherment of the Pyu language of Ancient Burma, From Vijayapura to Ksriksetra? The beginnings of Buddhist exchange across the Bay of Bengal, EFEO, Pondicherry, India, 31 July - 4 Aug 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W., 'A rule based Tibetan part-of-speech (POS) tagger for the creation of gold standard training data', 2017, - Software, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan *-as > -os: a small problem, an old method, MPI für Menschheitsgeschichte, Jena, Germany, 20 June 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan W.; Handy, Christopher, The Annotated Corpus of Classical Tibetan (ACTib), Part I - Segmented version, based on the BDRC digitised text collection, tagged with the Memory-Based Tagger from TiMBL., 1, Zenodo, 2017 Dataset, 2017 DOI

Hill, Nathan W., Using Technology Skillfully: Resources for Translators, Translation and Transmission, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA,, 31 May " 2 June 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W., Historical Linguistics of the Trans-Himalayan Family: combining traditional methods with newly available tools, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, 27 Apr 2017, 2017 Invited Talk, 2017

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan words for 'me' and 'us', Hamburg Universität, Germany, 6 Dec 2016, 2016 Invited Talk, 2016

Hill, Nathan W., A new look at Bailang, the second oldest Sino-Tibetan language, 5th International Conference of Oriental Studies -- Concepts, Methods, Challenges, and Perspective, Polska Akademia Nauk, Warsaw, Poland, 17-18 Oct 2016, 2016 Invited Talk, 2016

Hill, Nathan W., Explaining the irregularity of zos as the past tense of Tibetan za 'eat', Program in Indo-European Studies Weekly Graduate Seminars, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 21 Jan 2016, 2016 Invited Talk, 2016

Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of Tibetan to the Study of evidentiality, Edinburgh University, 27 Oct 2016, 2016 Invited Talk, 2016

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan phonological innovations, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 29 Apr 2015, 2015 Invited Talk, 2015

Hil, Nathan W., Current progress in Tibetan NLP and corpus linguistics, The New Historical Linguistics and the World of Annotated Corpora, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 09-13 Mar 2015, 2015 Invited Talk, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., The evidence for final *-r in Old Chinese, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 17 Nov 2015, 2015 Invited Talk, 2015

Garrett, Edward and Hill, Nathan W., Constituent order in the Tibetan noun phrase, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics , 17, 2015, p35-48 Journal Article, 2015

Hill, Nathan W., Tibétain linguistique et informatiques, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris, France, 30 Jan 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan in digital communication: Building a diachronic part of speech tagged corpus of Tibetan texts, Linguistic Department Seminar Series, SOAS, 6 May 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan in digital communication: Using an annotated corpus to facilitate the philological study of Tibetan texts, Digital Humanities Center, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 30 Oct 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., A rule-based tagger for Classical Tibetan: Negation and verb stems classification, Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, Cambridge, MA, USA, 4 Nov 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Using an annotated corpus to facilitate the philological study of Tibetan texts, Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, UK, 4-5 Sept 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Analogical changes in the Tibetan verb system, Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 5 Nov 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., Remarks on Bailang, the earliest attested Tibeto-Burman language, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 2 Oct 2014, 2014 Invited Talk, 2014

Hill, Nathan W., The development of a part-of-speech tag set for the preparation of a digital diachronic Tibetan corpus, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 6 May 2013, 2013 Invited Talk, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., A classification of Tibetan verb stems, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 12 Dec 2013, 2013 Invited Talk, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Competing criteria in the analysis of Tibetan verb tense, Institut für Indologie und Zentralasien-wissenschaften, Universität Leipzig, Germany, 16 Dec 2013, 2013 Invited Talk, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Proposal for the transliteration of Old Chinese: A methodological critique of current practice, Li Fang-Kuei Society Young Scholars Symposium, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 11-13 Aug 2013, 2013 Invited Talk, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *c in Burmese, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 2013, p334-345 Journal Article, 2013

Hill, Nathan W., Grammatical change as signifier to date Tibetan documents, Merkmals and Mirages: A Conference on Dating (Old) Tibetan Writing, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 26 June 2012, 2012 Invited Talk, 2012

Hill, Nathan W., The emergence of Tibetan 'dug as a 'mirative' marker, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 21 Mar 2012, 2012 Invited Talk, 2012

Hill, Nathan W., Distinguishing forms of the ablative (-nas, -las) and comparative (-las, -bas) in Classical and Old Tibetan, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK, 25 Apr 2012, 2012 Invited Talk, 2012

Hill, Nathan W., The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *c in Burmese, Department of Linguistics, Edinburgh University, UK, 11 Apr 2012, 2012 Invited Talk, 2012

Manson, Charles; Hill, Nathan W., A Gter ma of negatives: H. E. Richardson's photographic negatives of manuscript copies of Tibetan imperial inscriptions, possibly collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang Nor bu in the 18th century CE, recently found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-Modern Buddhist World. Institute of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies, Universität Wien, Austria, 15 Oct 2011, 2011 Invited Talk, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., An introduction to Chinese historical phonology, Early China Seminar, SOAS, 26 Jan 2011, 2011 Invited Talk, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., The Phywa and the Dmu: Comparison of two categories of gods in early Tibetan mythology, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 14 Nov 2011, 2011 Invited Talk, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of corpus linguistics to lexicography and the future of Tibetan dictionaries, Third International Conference on Tibetan Language., Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 9-14 Dec 2011, 2011 Invited Talk, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- An Old Tibetan mythic formula, Between Empire and phyi dar: the fragmentation and reconstruction of society and religion in post-imperial Tibet, Lumbini International Research Institute, Nepal, 3 Mar 2011, 2011 Invited Talk, 2011

Hill, Nathan W., A practical introduction to Chinese historical phonology, London Phonology Seminar, University College London, UK, 4 Feb 2010, 2010 Invited Talk, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., Vowel correspondences between Tibetan and Burmese, International Burma Studies Conference, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, Marseille, France, 6-9 July 2010, 2010 Oral Presentation, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., Refining the analysis of the correspondence of Written Burmese wa to Written Tibetan o, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Canada, 26 Apr 2010, 2010 Invited Talk, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- A Near Eastern Lehnübersetzung in Tibetan mythology, Cambridge University, UK, 12 Apr 2010, 2010 Invited Talk, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., An argument against 'mirativity' as a valid category of linguistic analysis: hdug in 'Lhasa' Tibetan, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Netherlands, 9 Apr 2010, 2010 Invited Talk, 2010

Hill, Nathan W., Les pronoms personnels en tibétain ancien comme un système de classification, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 26 May 2009, 2009 Invited Talk, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., *áruant- 'steed, courser': an Indo-Aryan loan into Trans-Himalayan, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, 19 Dec 2019, 2009 Invited Talk, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., An enumeration of the sound laws leading from pre-Tibetan to Old Tibetan, 15th Himalayan Languages Symposium, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA, 30-31 July 2009, 2009 Oral Presentation, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., The sku-bla ceremony: A rite of sacred Tibetan kingship, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK, 20 May 2009, 2009 Invited Talk, 2009

Hill, Nathan W., The Hphags-pa letter v- and laryngeal phenomena in Mongolian and Chinese, Workshop in Indo-European Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 17 Mar 2008, 2008 Invited Talk, 2008

Hill, Nathan W., A typological perspective on Classical Mongolian indirect speech, Second International Symposium on Mongolian Studies of China, Inner Mongolian Academy of Social Sciences, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia (PRC), 22 Sept 2008, 2008 Invited Talk, 2008

Hill, Nathan W., Personal pronouns in the Mila Rnamthar, Tibet and Her Neighbors, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 24-25 Apr 2004, 2004 Oral Presentation, 2004

Research Expertise

Description

I am a historical linguist specializing in the Sino-Tibetan languages. Historical linguistics retraces how languages diversify; along with genetics and archaeology, it is a way to recover human pre-history. The Sino-Tibetan family consists of 514 languages spoken across Asia. It includes some dozen literary languages like Tibetan or Chinese, but the great majority of Sino-Tibetan speakers are marginalized peoples with no tradition of writing, whose languages and ways of life are under imminent threat. These languages deserve the kind of sustained attention so far only given to Indo-European languages like Greek and Sanskrit; my goal is to facilitate this. My work as an individual charts the histories of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, and reconstructs their common ancestor. A decade of research on specific problems in each language and their comparison culminated in a 2019 monograph published with Cambridge. This book is already a touchstone in the field and will soon be published in Chinese translation. In an attempt to move the discipline beyond its present impasse, my current book project interrogates the primary sources and methods used to reconstruct Old Chinese in order to tease out where different scholarly traditions agree or not. As a doctoral supervisor and postdoctoral mentor, I also facilitate the documentation and revitalization of the many Sino-Tibetan languages that remain undescribed and at the verge of extinction. To date my postdocs and PhD students have together documented eight endangered languages spoken across Pakistan, India, Nepal, China and Burma. As a collaborator I contribute to large-scale projects that integrate computational linguistics with philological research, developing resources and tools that benefit both academic researchers and minority language speaker communities. As principal or co-investigator I have served on projects attracting over €11 million. These projects have developed Natural Language Processing tools, including for Tibetan part-of-speech tagging, Newar handwritten text recognition, and, with Microsoft, mobile phone predictive keyboards for 13 minority languages of China and India. Google and Microsoft's use of data from these projects to develop products for Tibetan speakers served as a case study for research impact in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF2021), earning the highest available `four star" score. My influence in shaping linguistics and Asian Studies has been widely recognized. I participated as an expert on research in the re-accreditation committees for France's premier area studies university (Inalco) and its national research laboratory in Asian linguistics (CRLAO). I am Vice President of the Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics. The European Research Council (ERC) and the national research councils of ten countries have asked me to review project proposals. I have also served on the advisory panels of four ERC projects and on the editorial boards of 12 journals. I am also a productive scholar, having authored 110 peer-reviewed publications, including three books and 69 articles"15 since 2021. I have 318 citations on Scopus, 215 in the last five years, and an H-index of 9, alongside 1,692 citations on Google Scholar with an H-index of 23.

Projects

  • Title
    • Han Phonology: When Chinese Became Chinese
  • Summary
    • Chinese is famous for its short simple words, its tones, and its simple grammar, but in the distant past Chinese was a very different language; Old Chinese (1300-100 BCE) lacked tones, had consonant clusters as impressive as those of German or Georgian, and it used prefixes and suffixes to form new words. By 602 CE, the date of the earliest Chinese pronunciation dictionary, Middle Chinese was already recognizably a form of the language we known today. How did Chinese change so much? The Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) holds the key; it was the first enduring empire in Chinese history, and among the most formative periods for Chinese thought and literature. At this time, the Confucian cultural milieu accompanying classical scholarship thrived. The Confucian classics themselves were edited and (literally) set in stone, while poetry and belletristic prose flourished. The Han also saw unprecedented exposure to and influences from foreign cultures, from grapes to backgammon, with Buddhism standing out as the period's most abiding foreign influence. This project will produce a Handbook of Han Chinese Phonology that will supersede the previous two book length studies of Han phonology, published respectively in 1958 and 1983. By collecting and formalizing existing knowledge of sound change during the Han period in a computer readable format, we will be able to rigorously test competing ideas and produce a reliable foundation for future progress. We will also applying state-of-the-art network analysis to the linguistic data of both well known and newly unearthed texts to pinpoint the time, place, and social milieu of known changes. Using this fresh collection of evidence and these new methods, we will decide among controversial proposals and make new discoveries. We will give the most thorough and empirical treatment so far of regional and social variation in speech over the period. In particular, by comparing the pronunciations implied by the rhymes in poetry written by Confucian literati and the pronunciations implied by the transcription of Indic terms in Buddhist texts, we will reveal the language systems of these two distinct religious communities.
  • Funding Agency
    • Arts and Humanities Research Council Research
  • Date From
    • May 2021
  • Date To
    • Apr 2025
  • Title
    • Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State
  • Summary
    • The Gupta dynasty dominated South Asia during the 4th and 5th centuries. Their period was marked by political stability and an astonishing florescence in every field of endeavor. The Gupta kingdom and its networks had an enduring impact on India and a profound reach across Central and Southeast Asia in a host of cultural, religious and socio-political spheres. Sometimes characterized as a 'Golden Age', this was a pivotal moment in Asian history. The Guptas have received considerable scholarly attention over the last century, as have, separately, the kingdoms of Central and Southeast Asia. Recent advances notwithstanding, knowledge and research activity are fragmented by entrenched disciplinary protocols, distorted by nationalist historiographies and constrained by regional languages and associated cultural and political agendas. Hemmed in by modern intellectual, geographical and political boundaries, the diverse cultures, complex polities and varied networks of the Gupta period remain specialist subjects, little-mentioned outside area studies and traditional disciplinary frameworks. The aim of this project is to work beyond these boundaries for the first time and so recover this profoundly influential dispensation, presenting it as a vibrant entity with connections across several regions and sub-continental areas. To address this aim, three PIs have formed an interdisciplinary team spanning linguistics, history, religious studies, geography, archaeology, Indology, Sinology and GIS/IT technologies. This team will establish a scientific laboratory in London that will generate the synergies needed to delineate and assess the significance of the Gupta Age and its pan-Asian impacts. The project's wider objective is to place Central,South and Southeast Asia on the global historical stage, significantly influence practices in Asian research and support EU leadership in Asian studies.
  • Funding Agency
    • European Research Council
  • Date From
    • Sept 2014
  • Date To
    • Aug 2020
  • Title
    • Tibetan in Digital Communication: Corpus Linguistics and Lexicography
  • Summary
    • In age, breadth and diversity of genre, Tibetan literature is in every way comparable to English. The Tibetan alphabet was invented in 650 CE. The earliest currently available securely dateable document dates to ca. 763 CE. Literary production has continued from that time unabated until today. Yet, the lexicographical resources of Tibetan are very inadequate and vastly inferior to what is available to English speakers. In total, students of Tibetan can draw on about a dozen dictionaries, most for Classical Tibetan. The scope of these lexicons tends to be poorly defined, and none of them meets the standards of scientific lexicography. Moreover, there is not a single work that covers the earliest period of Tibetan literature, Old Tibetan (650-1000 CE). The corpus and tools we propose to create will serve as the first step to advance the compilation of a comprehensive historical Tibetan dictionary akin to the Oxford English Dictionary. In order to achieve this, we propose to produce a large corpus of Tibetan texts spanning the language's entire history, drawn from Old, Classical and Modern Tibetan. In the past, scholars used laborious collections of slips organised and stored in vast filing cabinets in order to compile large dictionaries. Advances in computational linguistics mean that this work can now be achieved more thoroughly and effectively through the creation of annotated digital corpora. But our corpus, once carefully analysed and tagged, will not only pave the way for the compilation of Tibetan dictionaries of hitherto inconceivable calibre, but it will also prepare the ground for a wide range of other significant research initiatives. By mounting it on the Web, scholars from a wide range of disciplines (history, religion, literature, linguistics, etc.) working with Tibetan language materials will be able to search it and use its content for their own research. It is thus likely to become foundational to a vast array of research initiatives, benefiting many different constituencies in academia. Outside academia, in the modern world of electronic communication, our corpus will lay the foundation for the creation of new digital technologies for Tibetan (text messaging, automated translation, etc.). The high investment required to develop language software leaves languages without commercial or political power isolated and poorly resourced. Digital communication technologies are built on basic language processing tools (eg, word-segmentation programmes, part-of-speech taggers) of the very type we propose to create. Our work will reduce the cost to develop such technologies and thus attract commercial interest. Although Tibetan is spoken by more than two million people, it is barely represented in electronic media as a spoken language. We seek to remedy this by creating an electronic resource that will restore to Tibetans, irrespective of their residence or adopted nationality, the choice to use their language as they see fit in a world that is increasingly shaped by digital communication.
  • Funding Agency
    • Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant
  • Date From
    • Sept 2012
  • Date To
    • Aug 2015
  • Title
    • Pre-history of the Sino-Tibetan languages: the sound laws relating Old Burmese, Old Chinese, and Old Tibetan
  • Summary
    • The history of the languages of Europe is understood stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records. This feat is achieved by the discovery of sound laws through the comparison of attested languages, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Using such laws one can reconstruct not only the prehistoric language that gave rise to all of the Indo-European languages, but also explore the religion, society, and material culture of the speakers of this language.
  • Funding Agency
    • British Academy
  • Date From
    • Dec 2011
  • Date To
    • Aug 2014
  • Title
    • The Emergence of Egophoricity: a diachronic investigation into the marking of the conscious self
  • Summary
    • This project looks at the way certain Tibetan and Newar varieties express the perspective of the speaker in the sentence. In Lhasa Tibetan, for example, the auxiliary verb 'yin' can be used in sentences where the speaker is the subject (nga em-chi yin '*I'm* a doctor'), if the speaker wants to identify their personal relation or possession ('di nga'i bu-mo yin 'This is *my* daughter') or if the speaker chooses to emphasise who performed an action ('di khyed-rang-gi gsol-ja yin 'This is your tea [that *I* have made for you]'). Other Tibetan varieties, such as Jirel or South Mustang Tibetan also exhibit egophoric markers like Lhasa Tibetan 'yin', but not always in the same contexts. In Newar varieties that are also spoken in Nepal, however, egophoric marking consists of long vowels in verbal endings rather than separate (auxiliary) verbs (ji Manaj napalan-aa 'I (the speaker) met Manoj as planned' vs. ji Manaj napalan-a 'I met Manoj by coincidence'). Finally, in older stages of both Tibetan and Newar varieties, this egophoric marking cannot be found. The central question that this project aims to answer is how and why specific grammatical markers to indicate the speaker's involvement emerge over time in ways that slightly differ, even in closely related languages. What subtle grammatical clues can be found in olders stages of these languages that in later stages result in egophoric marking? In this project we first investigate how Present-Day Tibetan and Newar varieties grammatically express the speaker's involvement. For this purpose we will create annotated corpora: digital text collections enriched with linguistic information about the structure and meaning of each element in the sentence. Because there is no data available yet for the highly endangered Lalitpur Newar variety, we will conduct fieldwork in Nepal to document the language and collect texts for our corpora. We then add the same linguistic information to historical texts. Older archive texts in South Mustang Tibetan, for example, will be compared to 18-19th texts written in standard Classical Tibetan to investigate the development of the Present-Day Lhasa Tibetan egophoric marker 'byung', which indicates the speaker is the recipient of an action (khong gis ngar yige btang byung 'He sent *me* a letter.'). Present-Day South Mustang Tibetan also has a verb 'byung', which goes back to Old and Classical Tibetan 'byung' meaning 'receive, get'. But unlike Lhasa Tibetan, this verb in South Mustang Tibetan has not changed into an egophoric auxiliary verb. Because of the extensive and consistent linguistic annotation of our corpora, we will be able to systematically study subtle differences in use of verbs like 'byung'. Since our corpora will not only contain morphosyntactic annotation, but information about meaning and function in discourse context as well, we will be in a unique position to investigate complex grammatical phenomena like egophoricity. Investigating this in a historical context gives us the opportunity to test theories of languages change that make predictions about triggers and mechanisms of change in particular. Are language-internal factors (e.g. changes in phonology) responsible for the emergence of egophoric marking, can language-external factors (language contact) play a role and/or can we observe a combination of factors in these languages that have throughout history been spoken by people in close promixity in Nepal? Finally, since even closely-related Tibetan and Newar varieties exhibit some significant differences, comparison with egophoric marking on other languages can provide further clues on this complex phenomenon. In the final year of the project, we will therefore put our findings from Tibetan and Newar in crosslinguistic perspective.
  • Funding Agency
    • Arts and Humanities Research Council Research
  • Date From
    • Oct 2021
  • Date To
    • Sept 2025
  • Title
    • Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955-62
  • Summary
    • The Divergent Discourses project is an international, collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict that began in the high Himalayas in the 1950s and led to nearly two decades of armed conflict. That conflict continues today in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the exile Tibetan community, together with recurrent unrest and protests within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours. Not long after Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops to annexe Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, the traditional ruler of Tibet, fled with some 80,000 Tibetans to India. In response, Chinese officials produced millions of words in newsprint, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet and condemn the old regime. From India, exile Tibetans produced refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs, and histories of Tibet to counter China's claims. Materials of this kind, which are in large part polemical, are not often treated as major sources for historians. But the development of digital humanities and computational research techniques means that they can now be mined in numerous ways to extract details about events, individuals and ideas that would otherwise be little noticed in the texts within which they are buried. With these new research tools, innumerable pieces of data and information can be brought together from multiple sources, revealing new information and offering new insights into the history of the time. These innovative tools allow close study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their own account of Tibetan history, identity, and traditions. The divergence between these accounts has since shaped China's policies in Tibet, its tense relations with India, its strained relations with the US and the West, its response to recurrent protests by Tibetans within Tibet, and the six-decades-long failure of the exile and Chinese leaderships to reach a settlement. The project, which will be led jointly by an expert in modern Tibetan literature in Leipzig and a modern Tibetan historian working with a historical linguist in London, will collect almost entirely overlooked documents from libraries in Leipzig, Berlin, Oxford, Prague and elsewhere, including propaganda materials and newspapers from the 1950s. By adapting existing software tools, the project will develop computational tools that will make it possible for the first time for modern Tibetan texts to be compiled into a digital corpus of historical materials, where they can be annotated and cross-referenced to allow sophisticated searches and study. The three-year project will lead to publications with new insights about the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, about the arguments and narratives that they produced, and about the ways in which this cleavage changed subsequent events. The project will also create a website with examples of typical documents from the period with English translations, a database of events and names extracted from the documents, and online access to the texts and data collected by the project.
  • Funding Agency
    • Arts and Humanities Research Council and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
  • Title
    • Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction
  • Summary
    • TOMB (Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto- Bodish reconstruction) aims to yield a range of new contributions to our understanding of the Old Tibetan language and funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau by investigating ancient records concerned with non-Buddhist funerary rituals. In addition, the project will uncover important linguistic links to other regional language communities and will establish the first testable hypotheses about the genetic relationship of Tibetan languages. The synchronic perspective of the philological study will be complemented with historico-linguistic analysis. TOMB will specifically focus on translating documents from the Old Tibetan funerary corpus that have never been translated before. These manuscripts are remarkable for several reasons: 1) they provide insights into funerary rituals that did not survive beyond the Tibetan Empire; 2) they reflect elements of ritual culture shared with other non-Tibetan speaking groups in the region; 3), they offer evidence of earlier, pre-historical stages of the Tibetan language; and 4) they give us an opportunity to enhance our understanding of Tibetan languages and to uncover their genetic links to related languages. Through a comprehensive analysis of the corpus from both historical and text-linguistic perspectives, we will gain insights into archaisms that can be identified as features of pre-historical Tibetan. This foundational work will set the stage for reconstructing Proto-Tibetan. Identifying and describing these features will in turn contribute to the reconstruction of Proto-Bodish, the presumed ancestral language of Tibetan, East-Bodish, and Tamangic languages. The innovative approach to ritual textual sources as reservoirs of pre-historical linguistic forms tackles thus far unexplored fields of research and promises to enrich our understanding of the Tibetan non-Buddhist religious culture.
  • Funding Agency
    • European Commission
  • Date From
    • 1 Sept 2024
  • Date To
    • 31 Aug 2026
  • Title
    • Kinship Systems in Gyalrong: History and Transformation
  • Summary
    • The Na-Qiangic (NQ) languages are an endangered subgroup in Sino-Tibetan (ST), spoken by ethnic minorities in the Hengduan Mountains of Southwest China. The NQ-speaking area is home to great diversity of kinship and marriage patterns, where one finds zouhun, a non-conjugal visiting system, practiced by matrilineal communities. Many questions remain unanswered: Are matrilineal kinship and zouhun vestiges of once more widespread practices? Did these diverse kinship patterns originate from a common ancestral system? What are the factors leading to the diversity of family structures in this area? To answer these questions, KinSiGHT focuses on the Gyalrongic (NQ)-speaking area in northwestern Sichuan, and uses linguistic methods to trace transformations of kinship systems of the Gyalrongs. The two interlocking themes of this investigation will be (i) the directionality of transformation from the Proto-Gyalrongic kinship system to the synchronic systems, and (ii) correlations among historical changes in kinship systems, marriage patterns and NQ phylogeny. KinSiGHT will advance our understanding of the Gyalrongic kinship patterns and their values in revealing the origin of family structure in the Hengduan Mountains, as well as general principles of kinship transformation. KinSiGHT will enhance collaborations between linguists and anthropologists. During this fellowship, the PI, Shuya Zhang, will be based at the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies (TCD), where she will benefit from instructions from Prof. Nathan Hill in practicing historical linguistic methods. During the secondment at the Center for Himalayan Studies (CNRS Paris), she will work with Dr. Stéphane Gros, a prominent anthropologist specializing in ethnic minorities in Southwest China. The fellowship will enable the PI to become a leading female scholar in ST kinship studies, and will position her to prepare a competitive ERC grant application, while opening up new career opportunities in ethnological museums.
  • Funding Agency
    • European Commission
  • Date From
    • 1 Sept 2023
  • Date To
    • 31 Aug 2025
  • Title
    • Gyalrongic unveiled: Languages, Heritage, Ancestry
  • Summary
    • The secrets of human ancestry are often hidden in languages. Languages exhibiting most information about history are often endangered and understudied. Gyalrongic, spoken in the Tibetan region of Sichuan, China, is such a language group in the Sino-Tibetan family. They are extremely vulnerable and poorly understood, exhibiting an archaism surpassing even ancient languages like Chinese and Tibetan. Understanding the genetic position of Gyalrongic, its subgrouping, and the reconstruction of Proto- Gyalrongic is vital for retracing Sino-Tibetan ancestry. Thus, this research approaches the history of Gyalrongic by integrating lexical and morphological data of more than twenty varieties, freshly collected from the field. The project will carefully curate and publish the data. Traditional historical linguistic theories will combine force with state-of-the-art computational methods to achieve the research goals, namely, Gyalrongic phylogeny and Proto-Gyalrongic reconstruction. This research meets the urgent need of integrating traditional theories into computational approaches to historical linguistics, marking considerable progress in Sino-Tibetan studies. This research will also benefit fellow linguists as well as archaeologists, anthropologists and botanists in the same region, mutually confirming, challenging and refining their research, and foster a greater appreciation of cultural heritage and understanding of identities.
  • Funding Agency
    • Science Foundation Ireland and Irish Research Council
  • Date From
    • 01 Mar 2022
  • Date To
    • 28 Feb 2026
  • Title
    • Substrate language influence in the southern Himalayas
  • Summary
    • The Kusunda language of Nepal is spoken by only two people and its imminent extinction entails an irreplaceable loss to humanity. Particularly because, like Basque in Europe, Kusunda is a language isolate: a language unknown to be affiliated to any other language or language family of the world. As Basque may once have been spoken more widely across Europe, Kusunda speakers may once have lived throughout the southern Himalayan region, an area of exceptionally high linguistic diversity. This research will identify the linguistic traces left by Kusunda as lower prestige `substrate" language in later, more dominant and higher prestige `superstrate" languages, such as Tshangla and the Kho-Bwa varieties, spoken over 1,300 kilometres away in Northeast India. Thus, this research will provide new insights into the prehistory of Asia at a time depth and from a perspective not yet explored before and contribute to the developing sub-discipline of substrate language studies.
  • Funding Agency
    • British Academy
  • Date From
    • 1 Jan 2021
  • Date To
    • 31 Dec 2023
  • Title
    • Documentation and Description of the Laitu Language with a focus on endangered cultural practices
  • Funding Agency
    • Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  • Date From
    • 1 Apr 2018
  • Date To
    • 31 Mar 2020
  • Title
    • An audio-visual archive and searchable corpus of Kaike, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Dolpa, Nepal
  • Funding Agency
    • Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  • Date From
    • 1 Oct 2017
  • Date To
    • 30 Jun 2018
  • Title
    • Documentary Corpus of Chhitkul, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Northern India
  • Funding Agency
    • Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  • Date From
    • 1 Jun 2018
  • Date To
    • 30 Sep 2019
  • Title
    • Reconstruction of Proto-Western Kho-Bwa
  • Funding Agency
    • Swiss National Science Foundation
  • Date From
    • 1 Sep 2018
  • Date To
    • 29 Feb 2020

Recognition

Representations

I acted as an expert witness for the Chief State Solicitor"s Office of Ireland in a High Court case concerning the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters in the new Chinese Leaving Cert. Over the course of a year, I attended in-person and online meetings, took numerous phone calls, and had extensive email correspondences; I prepared two detailed reports for the court, the second responded to affidavits from the opposing side. My reports aimed to contextualize the debate for the court. They covered international pedagogical practices, research on Chinese teaching, and the Europe-wide discussion of establishing CEFR benchmarks for Chinese. 2023-2024

Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics (vice president) 2021-

Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale (editorial board member) 2024-

Open Research Europe - Linguistic Diversity (guest advisor) 2022-

Expert assessor, with special responsibility for research, in the re-accreditation of INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), 2024, and CRLAO (the Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale), 2017, on behalf of the HCERES (Haut Conseil de l'évaluation de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur). These five-yearly assessments are conducted by a committee of six, who prepare a pre-report on the basis of full access to internal documents, conduct a three-day site visit, and submit a final report to the French ministry of education. 2024, 2017

Rocznik Orientalistyczny (editorial board member) 2022-

Member of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College (2020-); college members are the Council's first port of call for assessing project proposals and from time to time also serve on the quarterly panels that make final funding decisions. Likewise in the peer review college of Research Foundation -- Flanders (FWO) (2021-2023). 2020-

Served on the advisory board of four European Research Council (ERC) grants in linguistics and Buddhist studies: the Advanced Grant "Buddhism's Early Spread to Tibet: Dunhuang and the Influence of Sinitic Scriptures" (Jonathan Silk, PI, 2024-2029), the Advanced Grant "Open Philology: The Composition of Buddhist Scriptures" (Jonathan Silk, PI, 2018-2023), the Consolidator Grant "ProduSemy: Productive Signs. A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Evolutionary, Typological, and Cognitive Dimensions of Word Families" (Johann-Mattis List, PI, 2023-2027), and the Starting Grant "Computer-Assisted Language Comparison" (Johann-Mattis List, PI, 2017-2022). 2018-

Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (associate editor) 2020-2022

International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Reconstruction (editorial board member) 2019-

Archiv Orientalní (editorial board member) 2019-

Invited by the European Commission to participate in the workshop 'Research Data Management: from planning to sharing and reuse of research data' (11 Sept 2018, Brussels), to advise on the development of data management guidelines for ERC grants. 2018

Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics (forum editor) 2019-

Corpus Linguistics Database (advisor) 2019-2022

Language Documentation & Description (editorial board member) 2016-

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (managing editor) 2016-2022

Central Asiatic Journal (editorial board member) 2013-

Himalaya (editorial board member) 2013-2017

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (regional editor) 2012-

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (deputy editor) 2018-2021

I have reviewed for a total of 54 different journals (too many to list individually here), including high impact and respected venues such as Science Advances, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Language, and Diachronica. 2009-

Academia Sinica (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2024

University of Hong Kong (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2022, 2024

University College Cork (external on hiring panel) 2021

Oklahoma State University (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2016

University of Virginia (external evaluator for promotion) 2013

University College Dublin (external examiner for Asian languages) 2024-2026

Oxford University (external examiner for MPhil in Tibetan Studies) 2013-2016

Awards and Honours

Li Fang-Kuei Society of Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar 2013

Li Fang-Kuei Society of Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar 2018

China Times Young Scholars Award 2008

Memberships

Peer Review College, Arts and Humanities Research Council 2020 – Current

International Association for Tibetan Studies 2010

Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2009

Philological Society 2009

Signet Society of Arts and Letters 2002