André-Georges Haudricourt (1911 - 1996) was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 botanist, anthropologist and linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

.

A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in Picardie

Picardie

Picardy is one of the 27 regions of France. It is located in the northern part of France.-History:The historical province of Picardy stretched from north of Noyon to Calais, via the whole of the Somme department and the north of the Aisne department...

. He obtained his baccalauréat

Baccalauréat

The 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 introduced by Napoleon I in 1808. It is the main diploma required to pursue university studies...

 in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique (The National Institute of Agriculture) in 1931. He studied Genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 (1932) and Leningrad

Leningrad

Leningrad 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 scientifique

Centre national de la recherche scientifique

The 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 languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

. Soon he became interested in the Asian languages. He went abroad to Hanoi

Hanoi

Hanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...

, working at the library of the École française d'Extrême-Orient

École française d'Extrême-Orient

The 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 phonology

Historical Chinese phonology

Historical 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 Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

, Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

 and other East Asian languages are based on the seminal insights of A.-G. Haudricourt, who clarified how a toneless

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

 language can become tonal, paving the way for the reconstruction of non-tonal ancestors to the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, such as Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Tai

Proto-Tai language

Proto-Tai is the reconstructed common ancestor of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Lu, Tai Dam, Northern Thai, Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang...

.

Haudricourt has also made significant contributions to Tai-Kadai historical phonology.

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
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