13 Facts About James Matisoff

James Matisoff is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

James Matisoff is a noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.

James Matisoff's father, a fish seller, was an immigrant from a town near Minsk, Byelorussian SSR.

James Matisoff attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959, where he met his wife, Susan Matisoff, later a scholar of Japanese literature, when the two shared a Japanese class.

James Matisoff received two degrees from Harvard: an AB in Romance Languages and Literatures and an AM in French Literature.

James Matisoff then studied Japanese at International Christian University from 1960 to 1961.

James Matisoff did his doctoral studies in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where Mary Haas, co-founder of the department, was then chair.

James Matisoff spent a year in northern Thailand doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies with support from a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship.

James Matisoff completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967, and made several field studies thereafter through an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.

James Matisoff later published an extensive dictionary of Lahu and a corresponding English-Lahu lexicon.

James Matisoff edited the journal Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area for many years.

James Matisoff participated in establishing the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, an annual conference held since 1968.

In 1987, James Matisoff began the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project, an historical linguistics project aimed at producing an etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field.