Professor Nathan Hill will deliver his Inaugural Lecture titled ‘Chinese Historical Phonology with Marxist Characteristics’.
Date: Wednesday 11 February 2026
Time: 18:15 - 19:15
Location: Robert Emmet Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin.
Please click here to register for a ticket or click on the image below.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Chinese Historical Phonology with Marxist Characteristics
When did knight come to be pronounced the same as night? This is the kind of problem historical linguists investigate and can often answer using familiar evidence such as alliteration and variant spellings. With Chinese things are trickier, because the writing system is much less transparent. In particular, linguists working on Chinese disagree about how much we can learn from what doesn’t happen in the sources: if a large corpus shows no spelling variation of an expected kind, is that a meaningful constraint on reconstruction, or simply an accident of survival and scribal practice? The lecture uses a concrete problem in Old Chinese reconstruction to bring this methodological question into focus and then steps back to ask what kind of “science” Chinese historical phonology can, and should, be. It sets a “facts first” empiricism against a more prediction-driven, hypothetico-deductive stance, and argues that the dispute about negative evidence is methodological rather than merely philological. I argue that the current impasse should be overcome by applying two aspects of Marxist philosophy of science, (i) a “double movement” between empiricism and deductivism (going back to Aristotle), and (ii) that the right approach to problem will itself account for the approaches it supersedes.
Biography
Nathan W. Hill is Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies at Trinity College Dublin, Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences and Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He is a historical linguist specialising in the Sino-Tibetan language family, with a particular focus on Tibetan and on Chinese historical phonology. Before joining Trinity in 2021, he taught at SOAS University of London (2008–2022), including as Reader in Tibetan and Historical Linguistics, and he has held visiting and research appointments in Europe, North America, and East Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (2009). His research combines philology, comparative reconstruction, and (increasingly) digital approaches to historical linguistic evidence, and has been supported by major funders including the AHRC and the ERC.
Further information on this inaugural lecture is available by emailing the Faculty Office, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at artshss@tcd.ie.