Jerry Norman The American linguist Jerry Norman (Lu6 Jierui ~ ~ fIM) passed away on July 7,2012, aged 75. His ideas have changed Chinese historical linguistics in several important ways. Norman's first contributions were made in Chinese dialectology, particularly regarding the MIn 13lJ group. His works on MIn include dialect descriptions, glossaries, etymological studies and studies in reconstruction. The MIn dialects have been-and for some authors still are-regarded as phonologically aberrant, possibly due to some kind of dialect mixture. This is because, unlike those of a majority of other Chinese dialects, MIn phonological distinctions cannot be predicted on the basis of the QieyUn «W3Y)) (a dictionary of Chinese characters prefaced in 601 CE, with pronunciations indicated in the jcmqie li W system). Norman's work clarified the relationship between MIn and Old Chinese. Norman began his scientific career documenting the phonology and lexicon of the MIn dialects. His Ph.D. was a phonological description of the dialect of JiAnyang ~ ~S in north FujiAn :m ~ (Norman 1969). In contrast to the (still) prevalent method of showing Chinese characters to an informant and asking how they are pronounced, Norman soon insisted on recording colloquial words, even when there was no obvious way to write them down by means of Chinese characters. Naturally he was interested in relating the forms he collected to Chinese characters found in early dictionaries, but he never let Chinese character readings replace information on the lexicon proper. Having accumulated first-hand data on a number of MIn dialects, much of it collected in Taiwan among refugees from the mainland, Norman embarked on a historical-comparative study of the MIn group. Rather than comparing each dialect with Middle Chinese Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientate 41(2): 341-351 (2012) © CRLAO-EHESS 131 Bd Saint Michel 75005 Paris 0153-3320/2012/041-340 342 Eulogy / Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale 4 J (20 J2) 34 J-35 J (MC) and attempting to establish a sequence of sound changes, which could derive MIn from Middle Chinese, Norman pioneered the use of the comparative method in Chinese dialectology; he worked out the sound correspondences across the MIn dialects directly, without the intermediary of Middle Chinese. The results for initial consonants, published in 1973 and 1974, were startling. The consonant system needed to account for all MIn dialects was far more complex than that of Middle Chinese. Altogether Norman's Proto-MIn required no fewer than six series of stops, which he gave (using labials for other places of articulation) as *p, *ph, *-p, *b, *bh and *-b. The hyphened stops *-p and *-b were lenited to sounds like [w] (in the case of dentals and velars, [I] and zero) in northern MIn dialects such as Jianyang, the language he had studied for his Ph.D. He also reconstructed two series of nasals and sonorants, plain and voiceless: *m and *mh. Importantly, while MIn onsets could not be derived from Middle Chinese distinctions, Norman's Proto-MIn did predict Middle Chinese distinctions accurately: Norman's *p and *-p corresponded to MC *p and his *b, *bh and *-b all corresponded to MC *b. Thus it became clear to those who accepted Norman's methodology that the MIn dialects were not aberrant but phonologically conservative, and that reconstruction of Old Chinese must account for the MIn distinctions. Initial moves in that direction were made by Benedict (1976) and Starostin (1989). Norman's next step was to demonstrate that the distinctions he had observed in MIn were also found elsewhere. His student O'Connor showed that the distinction between two kinds of sonorant initials in Norman (1973) matched a tonal distinction among sonorant-initial words in Hakka (O'Connor 1976). Norman (1991) later showed that the same distinction predicts tone register in early Chinese loans to Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai and Vietnamese. He further showed that the proto-MIn distinction between his plain and aspirated voiced stops .