André-Georges Haudricourt (1911 - 1996) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
botanist, anthropologist and
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
.
A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in
PicardieThis article is about the modern French region. For other uses, see Picardy .Picardy is one of the 26 regions of France. It is located in the northern part of France.-History:...
. He obtained his
baccalauréatThe baccalauréat , often known in France colloquially as le bac, is an academic qualification which French and international students take at the end of the lycée . It was invented under Napoleon I in 1808...
in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique (The National Institute of Agriculture) in 1931. He studied
GeneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
in
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
(1932) and
LeningradLeningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:Places:* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
(1934-1935). In 1940, he was employed by the
Centre national de la recherche scientifiqueThe National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....
, working at the Department of Botany.
André-Georges Haudricourt (1911 - 1996) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
botanist, anthropologist and
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
.
A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in
PicardieThis article is about the modern French region. For other uses, see Picardy .Picardy is one of the 26 regions of France. It is located in the northern part of France.-History:...
. He obtained his
baccalauréatThe baccalauréat , often known in France colloquially as le bac, is an academic qualification which French and international students take at the end of the lycée . It was invented under Napoleon I in 1808...
in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique (The National Institute of Agriculture) in 1931. He studied
GeneticsGenetics, , a discipline of biology, is the science of heredity and variation in living organisms. The fact that living things inherit traits from their parents has been used since prehistoric times to improve crop plants and animals through selective breeding...
in
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
(1932) and
LeningradLeningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:Places:* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
(1934-1935). In 1940, he was employed by the
Centre national de la recherche scientifiqueThe National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....
, working at the Department of Botany. He switched to the Department of Linguistics in 1945. His studies was first focused on the
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
. Soon he became interested in the Asian languages. He went abroad to
HanoiHanoi , estimated population 6.232.940 , is the capital and second-largest city of Vietnam. From 1010 until 1802, with a few brief interruptions, it was the political centre of an independent Vietnam. It was eclipsed by Huế during the Nguyen Dynasty as the capital of Vietnam, but Hanoi served as...
, working at the library of the
École française d'Extrême-OrientThe École française d'Extrême-Orient is a French institute dedicated to the study of Asian societies. Translated into English, it approximately means the French School of the Far East. It was founded in 1900 with headquarters in Hanoi in what was then French Indochina. After independence, its...
from 1948 to 1949.
Haudricourt made contributions to the study of
Historical Chinese phonologyHistorical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European...
with his pioneering articles, including
L'origine des tons en vietnamien, published in
Journal Asiatique in 1954. The article explains tonogenesis in Vietnamese and numerous other East and Southeast Asian languages. It was followed in 1961 by a more comprehensive account of the development and evolution of tonal systems.
Further developments in the study of
Old ChineseOld Chinese , or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese spoken from the Shang Dynasty , well into the Former Han Dynasty . There are several distinct sub-periods within that long period of time...
,
VietnameseVietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese , is the national and official language of Vietnam...
and other East Asian languages are based on the seminal insights of A.-G. Haudricourt, who clarified how a
tonelessTone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but...
language can become tonal, paving the way for the reconstruction of non-tonal ancestors to the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia (Proto-Sino-Tibetan, Proto-Thai)...
External links
Le centre André-Georges Haudricourt
- Obituary by Pascal Dibie and Shalva Weil, Anthropology Today, Vol. 12, No. 5. (Oct., 1996), pp. 24-25. Available through JSTOR
JSTOR is a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions.JSTOR was originally funded by the Andrew W...
.