Robert Burton Jones was a linguist whose research focused on the South East Asian languages, in particular Karen, Burmese and Thai. He was a professor at Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

.

Jones studied music as an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University

Southern Methodist University

Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...

, particularly focusing on the organ. In 1941, he joined the US army for World War II and studied Japanese in the army. After the war he began his studies again at Berkeley, graduating 1947.

He finished a Ph.D. in Linguistics also at Berkeley in 1958 under Mary Haas. He travelled on a Ford Foundation grant to Burma in 1957-58.

Jones taught at Georgetown University, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and in 1955, started at Cornell
University

Jones retired from Cornell in 1986.

Publications

• Jones, Robert B. (1953). The Burmese writing system. Washington, DC : American Council of Learned Soc..
• Jones, Robert B. (1961). Karen Linguistic Studies: Description, comparison, and texts. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Jones, Robert B. (1970). "Classifier Constructions in Southeast Asia.". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 90.1: 1-12
• Jones, Robert B. (1974). Rev. of John Okell
  John Okell
  John Okell is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is one of the world's leading experts on Burmese language and culture. Okell studied Classics at Oxford. He then received training in linguistics at SOAS under R.K. Sprigg and others before...
  
  , A reference grammar of colloquial Burmese. Language 50. 1: 205-7.
• Jones, Robert B. (1975). Rev. of Roop, An introduction to the Burmese writing system. Journal of Asian Studies 32. 1: 205-6.
• Jones, Robert B. (1975). The question of Karen linguistic affiliation. 8th International Sino-Tibetan Language and Linguistics.
• Jones, Robert B. (1976). "Sketch of Burmese dialects." Studies in Honor of George L. Trager. M. Estellie Smith, ed. The Hague: Mouton. 413-422
• Jones, Robert B. (1976). "Prolegomena to a phonology of Old Burmese". Southeast Asian History and Historiography: essays presented to D. G. E. Hall C. D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters, eds. Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press. 43-50
• Jones, Robert B. (1986). "Pitch Register Languages." Contributions to Sino-Tibetan studies. John McCoy, Timothy Light, eds. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
• Jones, Robert B. (1988). "Proto-Burmese as a test of reconstruction." On language: rhetorica, phonologica, syntactica: a Festschrift for Robert P. Stockwell from his friends and colleagues. Caroline Duncan-Rose and Theo Vennemann, eds. London: Routledge. 203-211

External links

• http://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/memorials/jones.pdf