This publication is supported by La Trobe University Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area http://www.latrobe.edu.au Volume 30.2 — October 2007 REPORT ON THE 40TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SINO-TIBETAN LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS (ICSTLL), HEILONGJIANG UNIVERSITY, SEPTEMBER 26-29, 2007 Jens Karlsson Lund University [email protected] In the far northeast of China, the mighty Songhua river, unusually devoid of water after an arid summer, ran partially shrouded in mist and rain, as the first of the 150 or so participants of the 40th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics arrived to the Ice City—Harbin, and Heilongjiang University—the venue for the conference of 2007.1 Chauffeurs and students constituting “components” of the “organisational apparatus”, headed by Prof. Dai Zhaoming, had a busy Tuesday meeting participants from nine different countries and regions, and shuttling them from the airport or train station to the conference venue, where registration and accommodation were managed. These tasks were, as far as I understand, carried out carefully, effectively and to the contentment of most participants. Mist and rain were driven off during the night, and a gentle autumn sun greeted us on Wednesday morning—the first day of the conference proper, and shone throughout most of the remainder of the conference, all in accordance with the “weather forecast” issued on the conference webpage months earlier! The Sun Forum of Heilongjiang University provided a thoroughly appropriate location for the opening ceremony with following keynote addresses, hosted by Prof. Sun Hongkai of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and 1 The conference was jointly organised by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese Central University for Nationalities and Heilongjiang University. 235 236 Jens KARLSSON Prof. Dai Qingxia of the Chinese Central University for Nationalities. The opening speech was delivered by Prof. Dai Zhaoming of Heilongjiang University, followed by an address by the vice president of the host university, Mr Zhang Zhengwen. This was followed up by some retrospective accounts of the history of the ICSTLL from Prof. James A. Matisoff of University of California, Berkeley, who was part of that octet of scholars who met up at Yale University back in 1968 for the first ICSTLL2. Prof. Sun Hongkai then gave an encouraging speech involving some personal thoughts concerning methods and attitudes in our field of academic work. Prof. Laurent Sagart of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris, reconstructed uvulars using the “Baxter-Sagart system of Old Chinese reconstruction”. Sagart also chaired a symposium (“academic salon”) on the relationship between languages in East Asia on the second evening of the conference. Prof. Lu Jianming of Peking University shared inspired insights about some aspects of the modern Chinese language in “Multiplicity of Semantic Relations Between Words”. Sagart’s and Lu’s presentations were rather telling examples of the development ICSTLL has undergone in terms of the scope of linguistic disciplines covered. Originally including comparative/historical (phonological) reconstruction only, the conference today embraces a wide range of linguistic domains, including synchronic semantics and syntax. The conference was then divided into branches of discussion groups, each dealing with mutually relevant topics. Around 150 different papers were presented, covering many areas of study, including Tibeto-Burmese languages (with separate groups on historical issues and Tibetan), Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien) languages, Kam-Tai languages, historical comparison of Sino-Tibetan languages, Ancient Chinese (separate groups on phonology, grammar, lexicology and orthography), Modern Chinese (separate groups on grammar and lexicology) and Chinese dialects (including separate groups on Min and Hakka). The Tibeto-Burman domain held treatments of a multitude of individual languages, including Jingpo, Lhaovo, Yi, Lahu, Akha, Qiang, Pumi and Rawang, among others. 2 Initially called the “Conference on Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction”. Report on ICSTLL 40 237 A series of special presentations were given on Thursday evening, two of which concerned the construction of highly relevant and valuable corpora—one speech corpus of endangered Chinese minority languages, presented by Liu Yan (Department of Linguistics, Central University of Nationalities, Beijing), and one systematic corpus for research on grammaticalisation in Chinese, presented by Zhao Xiwei (Harbin Normal University). The purpose of the former is as obvious as it is significant—to preserve the data of languages that would otherwise die with the passing of their last speakers. The latter concerns an area of research which has gradually gained more focus the last 10-15 years. An otherwise packed schedule admitted one pause for breath on Friday afternoon, as the participants were bussed off to the Island of the Sun to experience an old Russian settlement, now transformed into a kind of theme park, containing a few fairly unexpected attractions, such as a caged boar and mud wrestling. The main event of the afternoon, however, was doubtlessly the banquet at the “Golden Imperial Russian Theatre”, where tasty food was accompanied by a sequence of song and dance performances, ranging thematically from the plain cheerful (during which some conference participants even ventured to ascend the stage!) to the rather risqué (during which some conference participants ventured to take pictures, but were resolutely impeded from doing so by personnel of the establishment). An hour’s stroll along the long main street of Harbin, Zhongyang Street, concluded a, warily put, colourful afternoon, later more boldly (but rightly) dubbed by Prof. Matisoff “an unforgettable experience”. Saturday comprised further group discussions in the morning, and keynote speeches with the closing ceremony following in the afternoon. Shi Xiangdong of Nankai University, Tianjin, discussed how to separate cognates from loanwords in comparative research of Sino-Tibetan languages, with emphasis on the importance of distinguishing different historical stages when carrying out such work. Bao Huaiqiao, Chen Jiayou and Zheng Yuling (Dept. of Phonetics and Computational Linguistics, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, CASS) presented a systematic and comprehensive corpus of the acoustic features of Lhasa speech. Their project first started out in the early 1990’s, and has now resulted in a digital edition. Another corpus-building project was introduced by Li Bo (Harbin University). His database has the purpose 238 Jens KARLSSON of serving as a statistical foundation for research on the “evolution and application” of Chinese words and expressions. Chen Zhongmin of Zhejiang University argued in his address for the validity and applicability of cross comparison as a tool for the reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan languages, partially by using some classic examples of cross comparison in Indo-European languages, namely Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law. Lastly, Pan Wuyun of Shanghai Normal University discussed the origin of the Chinese Wu dialect, with two different models of language contact/language assimilation as the theoretical foundation. This last presentation triggered a fair number of questions from the audience, creating a suddenly vivacious atmosphere—a suitable rounding up of three intensive days of scholarly activity. The closing ceremony was hosted by Prof. James Matisoff and Prof. Dai Zhaoming. It included a summary of the conference by Prof. Dai Qingxia, who stressed the diversity, scale and importance of the conference, and an address by Prof. Matisoff on behalf of Dr. Justin Watkins, chief organiser of next years’ conference, which is to be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies of University of London. Dr. Watkins could not attend this year’s event due to preparations for field work in Myanmar. Matisoff also glimpsed into the further future of ICSTLL. Bangkok, Thailand, and Lund, Sweden will most likely provide the venues for 2009 and 2010, thus bringing the count to four held conferences each. Lastly, some statistical observations: of all the papers given, close to 40, equal to a bit over 35%, dealt with various aspects of modern Chinese (not including dialects). Studies on Tibeto-Burman languages (including those dealing exclusively with Tibetan and Tibetan dialects) constituted around 20% of the presentations. Slightly fewer, a bit under 20% of all papers, were concerned with Chinese dialects (primarily Min and Hakka). Another 15-20% dealt with Ancient (Classical) Chinese. Papers on Kam-Tai languages represented slightly more than 5% of the presentations. The last few percent were shared mainly between Miao- Yao languages and a few presentations with general theoretical issues as their focal point rather than any particular language. If divided into disciplines rather than languages, at a rough estimate, well over half of the presentations concerned grammatical research (here understood in a rather broad sense, roughly covering morphology, Report on ICSTLL 40 239 lexicology and syntax), while somewhere close to 40% dealt with phonology. Some papers didn’t quite fall into any of these two major categories, such as those focusing on orthography for instance. Naturally, a certain number of papers contained aspects of both major domains, but the impression that grammatical studies constituted a significantly larger portion of the assembled papers than the phonological counterpart is distinct enough to be worth noticing. Official website of ICSTLL 40: http://210.46.97.15/icstll40 Thanks to Rosa Vieira de Almeida. 240 .