Weldon South Coblin is a linguist and sinologist. He was a student of Li Fang-Kuei. Early in his career he made many important contributions to Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman linguistics, but since the mid 1990s has worked primarily on alphabetic representations of Chinese. Starting around that time along with Jerry Norman he promoted a new direction in Chinese historical phonology making less use of the Qieyun

Qieyun

The Qieyun is a Chinese rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title Qieyun literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese fănqiè system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."Lù Făyán was the chief editor...

 and other rhyme books

Rime dictionary

thumb|upright=1.0|A page from Shiyun Hebi , a rime dictionary of the [[Qing Dynasty]]A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary used for writing poetry or other genres requiring rhymes. A rime dictionary focuses on pronunciation and collates...

, and more use of the traditional comparative method. Coblin is a professor at the University of Iowa

University of Iowa

The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

.

Works

• Coblin, W.S. 1976 "Notes on Tibetan Verbal Morphology," T'oung Pao 52, pp. 45–70
• Coblin, W.S. 1987, "A note on Tibetan mu", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 166–168.
• Coblin, W.S. 1994, "An Old Tibetan variant for the word 'fox'", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 117–119. cite.
• Coblin, W.S. 2002, "On certain functions of 'a-chung in early Tibetan transcriptional texts", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 169–184. cite.
• Coblin, W.S. 2006, "Two Notes on Táng-time Tibetan Transcriptions of Chinese", in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 133–136.
• Coblin, W.S. 2007, A Handbook of 'Phags-pa Chinese. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3000-7

External links

• http://www.uiowa.edu/~asll/faculty/coblin-fac.shtml