James Matisoff

Matisoff was born July 14 , 1937 in Boston , Massachusetts to a working-class family. He attended Harvard from 1954 to 1959 and received a degree in Romance Languages and Literatures (A.B.) in 1958 and a degree in French Literature (A.M.) in 1959. After studying Japanese at International Christian University for one year (1960-1961), he returned to Harvard to study linguistics. He was not satisfied with the linguistics program at Harvard and opted to transfer to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in Linguistics in 1967.

Matisoff's doctoral dissertation was a grammar of the Lahu language, a Tibeto-Burman language belonging to the Loloish branch of the Lolo-Burmese family. He spent a year doing field work on Lahu during his graduate studies and made several field studies thereafter. His ''Grammar of Lahu'' was notable both for its depth of detail and the theoretical eccleticism which informed his description of the language.

After four years teaching at Columbia University (1966-1969), Matisoff accepted a professorship at Berkeley, where he remained until his retirement in 2001.

During his time at Berkeley, Matisoff founded and directed the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary And Thesaurus (STEDT) project, a long running project aimed at producing an Etymological dictionary of Sino-Tibetan organized by semantic field.

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	NAME	Matisoff, James A
	SHORT DESCRIPTION	Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University Of California, Berkeley and noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia
	DATE OF BIRTH	July 14 , 1937

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James Matisoff