Professor Nathan Hill

• Hill, Nathan, W., Tibetan-las, -nas and -bas, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 41, (1), 2012, p3-38Journal Article, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The six vowel hypothesis of Old Chinese in comparative Context, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 6, (2), 2012, p1-69Journal Article, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Cognates of Old Chinese *-n, *-r, and *-j in Tibetan and Burmese, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 43, (2), 2014, p91-109Journal Article, 2014, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., 'Mirativity' does not exist: hdug in 'Lhasa' Tibetan and other suspects, Linguistic Typology, 16, (3), 2012, p389-433Journal Article, 2012, DOI
• Simon, Walter (1893-1981) in, editor(s)Rint Sybesma, Wolfgang Behr, Yueguo Gu, Zev Handel, C.-T. James Huang, and James Myers , Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, Leiden, Brill, 2017, pp100-102 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2017, DOI
• Perfect experiential constructions: the inferential semantics of direct evidence in, editor(s)Lauren Gawne and Nathan W. Hill , Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2017, pp131-159 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2017, DOI
• Sino-Tibetan in, editor(s)Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Stekauer , The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp609-650 , [Chung, Karen Steffen; Hill, Nathan W.; Sun, Jackson T.-S.]Book Chapter, 2014, DOI
• A new interpretation of the mythological incipit of the Rkong po inscription in, editor(s)Tropper, Kurt and Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina , Tibetan Inscriptions, Leiden, Brill, 2013, pp171-182 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2013, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., A Note on Voicing Alternation In The Tibetan Verbal System, Transactions of the Philological Society, 112, (1), 2014, p1-4Journal Article, 2014, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Mark Turin: A Grammar of the Thangmi Language: with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture. (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region.) xxxvii, 958 pp. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. €169. ISBN 978 90 04 15526 8., Review of A Grammar of the Thangmi Language: with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, by Mark Turin , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 76, (1), 2013, p148-150Review, 2013, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Old Chinese *sm- and the Old Tibetan Word for `Fire', Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 42, (1), 2013, p60-71Journal Article, 2013, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Evolution of the Burmese Vowel System, Transactions of the Philological Society, 110, (1), 2012, p64-79Journal Article, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 21, (4), 2011, p441-457Journal Article, 2011, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Buddhism and Empire. By Michael Walter. pp. xxvii, 311. Leiden, Brill, 2009., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 20, (4), 2010, p559-562Review, 2010, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., An overview of Old Tibetan synchronic phonology, Transactions of the Philological Society, 108, (2), 2010, p110-125Journal Article, 2010, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Sommerschuh, Christine, Einführung in die tibetische Schriftsprache: Lehrbuch für den Unterricht und das vertiefende Selbststudium, Indo-Iranian Journal, 53, (3), 2010, p251-264Review, 2010, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The converb -las in Old Tibetan, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 73, (2), 2010, p245-260Journal Article, 2010, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (review), China Review International, 16, (2), 2009, p185-189Review, 2009, DOI
• Wu, Mei-Shin; Schweikhard, Nathanael E.; Bodt, Timotheus A.; Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the Art, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 6, (2), 2020, p1-14Journal Article, 2020, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Using Chinese Character Formation Graphs to Test Proposals in Chinese Historical Phonology, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 12, (2), 2020, p186-200Journal Article, 2020, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., The prefix g- and -o- ablaut in Tibetan present verb stems, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 12, (2), 2020, p229-236Journal Article, 2020, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Fellner, Hannes A.; Hill, Nathan W., The differing status of reconstruction in Trans-Himalayan and Indo-European, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 48, (2), 2019, p159-172Journal Article, 2019, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Fellner, Hannes A.; Hill, Nathan W., Word families, allofams, and the comparative method, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 48, (2), 2019, p91-124Journal Article, 2019, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., The Derivation of the Tibetan Present Prefix g- from v - Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 72, (3), 2019, p325-332Journal Article, 2019, DOI
• Miles, James; Miyake, Marc; Hill, Nathan W., The use of Reflectance Transformation Imaging in the recording and analyses of Burmese Pyu inscriptions, Archaeological Research in Asia, 16, 2018, p130-138Journal Article, 2018, DOI
• Meelen, Marieke, Hill, Nathan W., Segmenting and POS tagging Classical Tibetan using a memory-based tagger, Himalayan Linguistics, 16, (2), 2018, p64 - 89Journal Article, 2018, DOI
• List, Johann-Mattis; Pathmanathan, Jananan Sylvestre; Hill, Nathan W.; Bapteste, Eric; Lopez, Philippe, Vowel purity and rhyme evidence in Old Chinese reconstruction, Lingua Sinica, 3, (1), 2017Journal Article, 2017, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Songs of the Bailang: A New Transcription with Etymological Commentary, Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 103, (1), 2017, p386-429Journal Article, 2017, DOI , URL , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., A refutation of Song's (2014) explanation of the 'stop coda problem' in Old Chinese, International Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 3, (2), 2016, p270-281Journal Article, 2016, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan. W., A Lexicon of Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition, Munich, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010Book, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., The Evidence for Chinese *-r, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 9, (2), 2016, p190-204Journal Article, 2016, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Owen-Smith, Thomas; Hill, Nathan W., Trans-Himalayan Linguistics, Berlin, de Gruyter Mouton, 2013Book, 2013, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Proposal for a transcription of Chinese characters in the study of early Chinese language and literature., Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 8, (1), 2015, p48-60Journal Article, 2015, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Grammatically Conditioned Sound Change, Language and Linguistics Compass, 8, (6), 2014, p211-229Journal Article, 2014, DOI
• Tibetan Palatalization and the gy versus g.y Distinction in, editor(s)Hill, Nathan W. , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp383-398 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The sku bla Rite in Imperial Tibetan Religion, Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, 24, (1), 2015, p49-58Journal Article, 2015, DOI , URL
• Hill, Nathan W., Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque, Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque: Egophoricity, Linguistic Typology, 24, (1), 2020, p201-208Review Article, 2020, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., Origins and Migrations in the Extended Eastern Himalayas. Edited by Toni Huber and Stuart Blackburn. Leiden, Brill, 2012., Review of Origins and Migrations in the Extended Eastern Himalayas, by Toni Huber and Stuart Blackburn, eds. , Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland, 25, (2), 2015, p366-368Review, 2015, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The verb 'bri 'to write' in Old Tibetan, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 68, 2005, p177-182Journal Article, 2005
• Hill, Nathan W., Once more on the letter v - Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 28, (2), 2005, p111-141Journal Article, 2005
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan vwa 'fox' and the sound change Tibeto-Burman *wa -> Old Tibetan o, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 19, (2), 2006, p75-90Journal Article, 2006
• Hill, Nathan W., Personalpronomina in der Lebensbeschreibung des Mi la ras pa, Kapitel III, Zentralasiatische Studien, 36, 2007, p277-287Journal Article, 2007
• Hill, Nathan W., The Hphags-pa letter v- and laryngeal phenomena in Mongolian and Chinese, Central Asiatic Journal, 52, (2), 2009, p183-205Journal Article, 2009
• Hill, Nathan W., Aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants in Old Tibetan, Language and Linguistics, 8, (2), 2007, p471-493Journal Article, 2007
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan as a plain initial and its place in Old Tibetan phonology, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 32, (1), 2009, p115-140Journal Article, 2009
• Hill, Nathan W., A note on the phonetic evolution of yod-pa-red in central Tibet, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 33, (1), 2010, p93-94Journal Article, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., Personal pronouns in Old Tibetan, Journal Asiatique, 298, (2), 2010, p549-571Journal Article, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., Alternances entre v et b en tibétain ancien et dans les langues tibétaines modernes, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 20, 2011, p115-122Journal Article, 2011
• Hill, Nathan W., Multiple origins of Tibetan o, Language and Linguistics, 12, (3), 2011, p707-721Journal Article, 2011
• Hill, Nathan W., A note on the history and future of the 'Wylie' system, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 23, 2012, p103-105Journal Article, 2012
• Hill, Nathan W., Relative ordering of Tibetan sound changes affecting laterals, Language and Linguistics, 14, (1), 2013, p193-209Journal Article, 2013
• Hill, Nathan W., Three notes on Laufer's law, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 36, (1), 2013, p57-72Journal Article, 2013
• Hill, Nathan W., Contextual semantics of 'Lhasa' Tibetan evidentials, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 10, (3), 2013, p47-54Journal Article, 2013
• Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- an Old Tibetan mythic formula., Zentralasiatische Studien, 45, 2016, p203-216Journal Article, 2016
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan part-of-speech conundrums: mang and yun ring, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, 68, (2), 2015, p65-72Journal Article, 2015
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan first person singular pronouns, Rocznik Orientalistyczny, 70, (2), 2017, p161-169Journal Article, 2017, TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan zero nominalization, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 48, 2019, p5-9Journal Article, 2019, TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., A typological perspective on Classical Mongolian indirect speech, Central Asiatic Journal, 56, 2014, p11-18Journal Article, 2014
• Hill, Nathan W., Proto-Kuki-Chin initials according to Toru Ohno and Kenneth VanBik, Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 7, 2014, p11-30Journal Article, 2014
• Hill, Nathan W., Some Tibetan verb forms that violate Dempsey's law, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 29, 2014, p99-109Journal Article, 2014
• Iwao, Kazushi; Hill, Nathan W.; Takeuchi, Tsuguhito, Old Tibetan Inscriptions, Tokyo, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2009Book, 2009
• Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Zadoks, Abel, Disambiguating Tibetan verb stems with matrix verbs in the indirect infinitive construction, Bulletin of Tibetology, 49, (2), 2013, p35-44Journal Article, 2013
• Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Zadoks, Abel, A rule-based part-of-speech tagger for Classical Tibetan, Himalayan Linguistics, 13, (2), 2014, p9-57Journal Article, 2014
• Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Kilgarriff, Adam; Vadlapudi, Ravikiran; Zadoks, Abel, The contribution of corpus linguistics to lexicography and the future of Tibetan dictionaries, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 32, 2015, p51-86Journal Article, 2015
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Foster, Christopher, Towards a standardized annotation of rhyme judgments in Chinese historical phonology (and beyond), Journal of Language Relationship, 17, (1), 2019, p26-43Journal Article, 2019
• Dugdak, Sonam; Hill, Nathan W., 'Share the sweets', An introspective analysis of copulas following adjectives in Modern Standard Tibetan, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 52, 2019, p185-192Journal Article, 2019
• Hill, Nathan W., Hare lõ: the touchstone of mirativity, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 13, (2), 2015, p24-31Journal Article, 2015
• Verba moriendi in the Old Tibetan Annals in, editor(s)Christopher Beckwith , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages III, Halle, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2008, pp71-86 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2008
• The allative, locative, and terminative cases (la-don) in the Old Tibetan Annals in, editor(s)Imaeda Yoshiro and Mathew Kapstein , Studies on Old Tibetan Documents, Tokyo, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studie, 2011, pp3-38 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2011
• Introduction in, editor(s)Nathan W. Hill , Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp1-4 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2012
• Meelen, Marieke; Roux, Élie; Hill, Nathan W., Optimisation of the Largest Annotated Tibetan Corpus Combining Rule-based, Memory-based, and Deep-learning Methods, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20, (1), 2021, p1-11Journal Article, 2021, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Adams, Oliver; Galliot, Benjamin; Wisniewski, Guillaume; Lambourne, Nicholas; Foley, Ben; Sanders-Dwyer, Rahasya; Wiles, Janet; Michaud, Alexis; Guillaume, Séverine; Besacier, Laurent; Cox, Christopher; Aplonova, Katya; Jacques, Guillaume; Hill, Nathan W., User-Friendly Automatic Transcription of Low-Resource Languages: Plugging ESPnet into Elpis, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 2021, p51-62Journal Article, 2021, DOI , URL
• Some Tibetan first person plural inclusive pronouns in, editor(s)Hanna Havnevik and Charles Ramble , From Bhakti to Bon, Oslo, Novus, 2015, pp242-248 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2015
• Languages: Tibetan in, editor(s)Jonathan A. Silk, Richard Bowring, Vincent Eltschinger and Michael Radich , Encyclopedia of Buddhism, Leiden, Brill, 2015, pp917-924 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2015
• Tibetan in, editor(s)Nicola Grandi and Livia Kortvelyessy , Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp381 - 388, [Simon, Camille; Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2015
• Tibeto-Burman *dz- > Tibetan z- and related proposals in, editor(s)Richard VanNess Simmons and Newell Ann Van Auken , Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics, Taipei, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2014, pp167-178 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2014
• The emergence of the pluralis majestatis and the relative chronology of Old Tibetan texts in, editor(s)Franz-Karl Ehrhard and Petra Maurer , Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe for Christoph Cüppers, Andiast, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 2013, pp249-262 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2013
• A Gter ma of negatives. H.E. Richardson's photographic negatives of manuscript copies of Tibetan imperial inscriptions possibly collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu in the 18th century CE, recently found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford in, editor(s)Kurt Tropper , Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-modern Buddhist World. Proceedings of the Eponymous Conference Held in Vienna, 14-15 Oct. 2011, Vienna, Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, 2014, pp83-115 , [Hill, Nathan W.; Manson, Charles]Book Chapter, 2014
• Introduction in, Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2013, pp1-10 , [Owen-Smith, Tom and Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2013
• Hill, Nathan, Sam Van Schaik: Tibet: A History. xxiii, 324 pp. London and New York: Yale University Press, 2011. £25. ISBN 978 0 300 15404 7., Review of Tibet: A History, by Sam Van Schaik , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 75, (1), 2012, p190-192Review, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The Envoys of Phywa to Dmu (PT 126), Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 60, 2021, p84-143Journal Article, 2021, TARA - Full Text
• Scholarship on Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) languages of South East Asia in, editor(s)Paul Sidwell and Mathias Jenny , The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2021, pp111-138 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2021, TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019Book, 2019, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan *-as > -os, International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Reconstruction, 12, 2016, p163-173Journal Article, 2016, TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., Two notes on Proto-Ersuic, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 51, (1), 2022, p105-114Journal Article, 2022, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• The lexicography of Tibetan in, editor(s)Patrick Hanks and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver , International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography, Berlin, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017, pp1-11 , [Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward]Book Chapter, 2017, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Accusative alignment in the Old Tibetan switch reference system, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 4, (2), 2022, p300-311Journal Article, 2022, TARA - Full Text
• List, Johann-Mattis; Vylomova, Ekaterina; Forkel, Robert; Hill, Nathan W.; Cotterell, Ryan D., The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2022), 2022, p52 - 62Journal Article, 2022, TARA - Full Text
• O'Neill, Alexander James; Hill, Nathan W., Text Recognition for Nepalese Manuscripts in Pracalit Script, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 8, (26), 2022, p1-6Journal Article, 2022, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Forkel, Robert, A New Framework for Fast Automated Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns, Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2022, Dublin, 2022, pp89-96Conference Paper, 2022
• Hill, Nathan W., Making and agreeing to requests in Old Tibetan, Himalayan Linguistics, 21, (1), 2023, p29-39Journal Article, 2023, TARA - Full Text
• Baley, Julien; Hill, Nathan W.; Caldwell, Ernest, Chinese Transcription of Buddhist Terms in the Late Hàn Dynasty, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9, (10), 2023, p1-8Journal Article, 2023, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., Andrew B. Liu: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asia Institute of Columbia University.) xi, 360 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. $50. ISBN 978 0 30024373 4., Review of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India, by Andrew B. Liu , Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 86, (1), 2023, p198-200Review, 2023, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• Hill, Nathan W., A Tibetan Passive Construction in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Bulletin of Tibetology, 54, (1), 2023, p213-228Journal Article, 2023
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Forkel, Robert; Blum, Frederic, Representing and Computing Uncertainty in Phonological Reconstruction, 4th International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2023, Singapore, 2023, 2023Oral Presentation, 2023, TARA - Full Text
• Li, Shihua; Hill, Nathan W., Printed Text Recognition for Lexical Lists in Chinese-International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Glossing, Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9, (15), 2023, p1-8Journal Article, 2023, DOI , TARA - Full Text
• The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality in, editor(s)Lauren Gawne and Nathan W. Hill , Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017, pp1--38 , [Hill, Nathan W. and Gawne, Lauren]Book Chapter, 2017, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden, Brill, 2012Book, 2012, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., An Indological Transcription of Middle Chinese, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 52, (1), 2023, p40-50Journal Article, 2023, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., The e-grade in Tibetan Honorifics, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 15, 2022, p479-483Journal Article, 2022
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W.; Blum, Frederic; Juárez, Cristian, Grouping sounds into evolving units for the purpose of historical language comparison, Open Research Europe, 4, (31), 2024, p1-11Journal Article, 2024, DOI
• Origin of the r- allomorph of the Tibetan causative s- in, editor(s)Kurtis Schaeffer, William McGrath, and Jue Liang , Histories of Tibet: Essays in honor of Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, New York, Wisdom Publications, 2023, pp106-114 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2023
• Two notes on Tibetan reg 'shave' in, editor(s)Katarzyna Marciniak, Stanislaw Jan Kania, Malgorzata Wielislawa-Soltwedel, and Agata Bareja-Starzynska , Guruparampara: Studies on Buddhism, India, Tibet, and more in honour of Professor Marek Mejor, Warsaw, University of Warsaw Press, 2022, pp157-160 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2022
• Worin besteht der Unterschied zwischen Präskription und Superskription in der tibetischen Orthographie in, editor(s)Christoph Cüppers, Karl-Heinz Everding, and Peter Schwieger , Life in Tibetan Studies: Festschrift for Dieter Schuh on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, Lumbini, Lumbini International Research Institute, 2022, pp217-229 , [Hill, Nathan W.]Book Chapter, 2022
• Hill, Nathan W., Compte rendu de Paul G. Hackett, 'A Tibetan Verb Lexicon', Revue d'études Tibétaines, 6, 2004, p78-98Review Article, 2004
• Hill, Nathan W., Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Review of Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart , Archiv orientalni, 85, (1), 2017, p135-140Review, 2017
• Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of Tangut to Trans-Himalayan comparative linguistics, Archiv orientalni, 83, (1), 2015, p187-200Review Article, 2015
• Hill, Nathan W., Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax by Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler. Leiden: Brill, 2011., Review of Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax, by Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler, eds. , European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 39, 2011, p200-206Review, 2011
• Hill, Nathan W., North East Indian Linguistics: volume 3, Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, and Mark W. Post, eds. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd., 2011., Review of North East Indian Linguistics: volume 3, by Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, and Mark W. Post, eds. , European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 40, 2011, p134-138Review, 2011
• Hill, Nathan W., Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, Review of Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change, by Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, eds. , China Review International, 16, (2), 2010, p185-189Review, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., Christine Sommerschuh, Einfuehrung in die tibetische Schriftsprache: Lehrbuch fuer den Unterricht und das vertiefende Selbststudium by Christine Sommerschuh. Nordstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2008., Indo-Iranian Journal, 53, (3), 2010, p251-264Review Article, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., James A. Matisoff, Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction by James A. Matisoff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003., Language and Linguistics, 10, (1), 2009, p173-195Review Article, 2009
• Hill, Nathan W., Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, eds, The state of Sino-Tibetan, Archiv Orientalni, 85, (2), 2017, p305-315Review Article, 2017
• Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 14, 1, (2021), Hill, Nathan W.; Lai YunfanJournal, 2021
• ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20, 2, (2021), Special issue on Tibetan NLPp, Hill, Nathan W.; Long CongjunJournal, 2021
• Himalayan Linguistics, 15, 2, (2016), Special issue on Tibetan NLPp, Hill, Nathan W.; Di JiangJournal, 2016
• Gawne, Lauren; Hill, Nathan W., Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017Book, 2017
• Yukawa Yasutoshi, 'Lhasa Tibetan predicates', Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2017, - 187-224Translation, 2017
• Nishi Yoshio, 'Old Burmese ry- a Remark on Proto-Lolo-Burmese Resonant Initials', 2017, - 1-10Translation, 2017
• Nishi Yoshio, 'Proto-Lolo-Burmese and Old Burmese Sources of Written Burmese -ac', 2016, - 97-129Translation, 2016
• Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho, 'Love poems of the sixth Dalai Lama', Sources of the Tibetan Tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, - 557-559Translation, 2013
• Michael Hahn, 'Foundational questions of Tibetan morphology', 2008, - 3-19Translation, 2008
• Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho, 'Love poems of the sixth Dalai Lama', 2008, - 80-91Translation, 2008
• Pa tshab pa sangs dbang 'dus, 'An introduction to the text of the newly discovered Khrom chen stele', 2007, - 3-9Translation, 2007
• anonymous, 'The Old Tibetan Chronicle: chapter 1', 2006, - 89-101Translation, 2006
• Hill, Nathan; Lai Yunfan, Introduction to BCL Forum: Research of PRC scholars on selected topics in Chinese historical linguistics, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 14, (1), 2021, p55-56Journal Article, 2021, DOI
• Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, 72, (2024), Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan; Faggionato, ChristianJournal, 2024, TARA - Full Text
• Baley, Julien; Hill, Nathan W., Mechanizing historical phonology, The Sixth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology,, Edinburgh, Scotland, 4-5 December 2023, 2023Oral Presentation, 2023
• Hill, Nathan W., Developing an NLP pipeline to Tibetan and Newar corpus creation with an emphasis on the syntax-pragmatics interface, Building bridges through Applied Linguistics, Munster Technological University, 30 Sept - 1 Oct, 2023Oral Presentation, 2023
• List, Johann-Mattis; Forkel, Robert; Hill, Nathan W., Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns, 3rd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2022 (LChange'22), Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, 28 May 2022, 2022Conference Paper, 2022
• Hill, Nathan, Why does Tibetan stack its letters?, 8th International Conference of Oriental Studies: Challenges of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Approaches, Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland, 24-25 Nov 2019, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Hill, Nathan W., Some Philological Remarks on PT 126 'The Envoys of Phywa to Dmu', The 15th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Inalco, Paris, 7-13 July 2019, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Hill, Nathan W., Toward a computational implementation of the traditional comparative method, International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 1-5 July 2019, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Fellner, Hannes; Hill, Nathan W., A comparison of allofams in Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European, The 52nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL52), University of Sydney, 24-26 June 2019, 2019Oral Presentation, 2019
• Miyake, Marc; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Pyu inscriptions of early Burma, 7th International Conference of Oriental Studies: Collections of Texts and Artefacts, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Krakow, Poland, 22-24 Oct 2018, 2018Oral Presentation, 2018
• Fellner, Hannes A.; Gunkel, Dieter; Hill, Nathan W., À cheval donné on regarde les dents. The Indo-European origin of the Trans-Himalayan words for 'horse', International Colloquium on Loanwords and Substrata in Indo-European languages, Limoges, France, 4-7 June 2018, 2018Oral Presentation, 2018
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W., The Sino-Tibetan language family: What we know, what we can know, and what we know we cannot know, 33. Deutscher Orientalistentag: Asien, Afrika und Europa, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany., 18-22 Sept 2017, 2017Oral Presentation, 2017
• Hill, Nathan W., Schiefner's conjecture: origins of proto-Burmish pre-glottalized consonants, 227th Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society, Los Angeles, USA, 17 Mar 2017, 2017Oral Presentation, 2017
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan reg 'shave' (an exception to Dempsey's law), 14th International Association for Tibetan Studies, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway, 19-25 June 2016, 2016Oral Presentation, 2016
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan phonological innovations, 48th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 21-23 Aug 2015, 2015Oral Presentation, 2015
• Hill, Nathan W., The pre-history of Old Chinese, 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy, 27-31 July 2015, 2015Oral Presentation, 2015
• Hill, Nathan W., Inferential semantics of direct evidence: 'Lhasa' Tibetan bzhag and Kham oleo, 24th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Yangon University, Burma, 27-31 May 2014, 2014Oral Presentation, 2014
• Hill, Nathan W., Relative chronology of Burmese sound changes, 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Universitetet i Oslo, Norway, 5-9 Aug 2013, 2013Oral Presentation, 2013
• Hill, Nathan W., Rituals of state and the envoys of Phywa to Dmu, 13th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 21-27 July 2013, 2013Oral Presentation, 2013
• Hill, Nathan W., A new interpretation of the mythological incipit of the Rkong-po inscription, 12th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 15-21 Aug 2010, 2010Oral Presentation, 2010
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan palatalization and the gy versus g.y distinction, Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages Symposium IV, SOAS University of London, 16 Sept 2008, 2008Oral Presentation, 2008
• Hill, Nathan W., Alternances entre h et b en tibétain ancien et dans les langues tibétaines modernes, XXIIe Journeés de Linguistique de l'Asie Orientale, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 9-10 June 2008, 2008Oral Presentation, 2008
• Hill, Nathan W., Verbs for death in the Old Tibetan Annals, 11th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Königswinter, Germany, 27 Aug - 2 Sept 2006, 2006Oral Presentation, 2006
• Hill, Nathan W., Aspirate and non-aspirate voiceless stops in Old Tibetan, 11th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 6-9 Dec 2005, 2005Oral Presentation, 2005
• Hill, Nathan W., The inclusive/exclusive distinction in Middle Tibetan, 37th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Lunds Universitet, Sweden, 1-3 Oct 2004, 2004Oral Presentation, 2004

• Hill, Nathan W., The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *c in Burmese, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 2013, p334-345Journal Article
• Garrett, Edward and Hill, Nathan W., Constituent order in the Tibetan noun phrase, SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics , 17, 2015, p35-48Journal Article
• Hill, Nathan W., Understanding ablaut in the Tibetan verb, University of Hamburg, 26 June 2024, 2024Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Competing perspectives on the reconstruction of uvulars in Old Chinese, University of Cambridge, 6 Mar 2024, 2024Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Reconstruction of " h" `tiger' in Old Chinese, Xiamen University, 24 Nov 2023, 2023Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Chinese Historical Linguistics in the West, Xiamen University, 23 Nov 2023, 2023Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W.; Baley, Julien, Graph theory approaches to Buddhist transcriptional Chinese, Advanced Computational Methods for Studying Buddhist Texts, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 27 April 2023, 2023Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan switch-reference subject marking and evidentiality, Person Marking in Tibeto-Burman, University of Cologne, 12 Dec 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Relative chronology of some Bola sound changes, First Boya Linguistic Forum, Peking University, 15-16 Oct 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The syntax of subordination with verba dicendi matrix verbs in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Linguistics Research Seminar, TCD, 21 Sept 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Making and Agreeing to Requests in the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Tsinghua University, 6 May 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Does Tibetan have a passive voice?, Sixth Sino-Tibetan Research Methodology Workshop (STLLRMW 2022), Nankai University, Tianjin, 16 Aug 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Marx's theory of absolute rent and its role in explaining the divergence of prices from values, Irish Institute for Chinese Studies, University College Dublin, 10 March 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Meelen, Marieke; Faggianato, Christian; Hill, Nathan W., Introducing the research project 'The Emergence of Egophoricity' with a case study of the Old Tibetan Ramayana, Typology of evidential systems, Inalco, Paris, 25 February 2022, 2022Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The Chinese state's approach to the national question in the 20th century, Centre for Asia-Pacific Research, University College Dublin, 25 November 2021, 2021Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The transformation of exploitation into profit: a sticky point in Marxist economics, Department of Asian Studies, University College Cork, Ireland, 23 November 2021, 2021Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., How the Horse (") and Chariot (") Came to China, 2021 Annual Conference of MU Chinese Studies Chinese Language and Culture in Ireland: New Developments and Challenges, Maynooth University, 30 October 2021, 2021Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Applying NLP to Buddhist Textual Criticism, International Symposium on Eurasian and Buddhist Philology in Memoriam of Professor Tschen Yin-Koh, Tsinghua University, PRC, October 15-17, 2021, 2021Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., How Chinese used to sound: the challenges of an opaque writing system in the study of historical phonology, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Netherlands, 20 July 2021, 2021Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The Past and Future of Chinese Historical Phonology: Philology, Reconstruction, and Network Theory, Oxford Centre for Chinese Studies, 27 Feb 2020, 2020Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Worin besteht der Unterschied zwischen Präskription und Superskription in der tibetischen Orthographie, Abteilung für Mongolistik und Tibetstudien, Universität Bonn, 19 Feb 2020, 2020Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The application of network theory to Chinese historical phonology: rhymes, xiesheng, and fanqie, School of Literature, Renmin University of China, 25 Dec 2019, 2019Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Major problems in Sino-Tibetan comparative studies, School of Chinese Classics, Renmin University of China, 24 Dec 2019, 2019Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The difference between sngon-hjug and mgo-can consonants in Old Tibetan phonotactics, Research Institute for Chinese Minority Languages, Central University of Nationalities, 19 Dec 2019, 2019Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., *áruant- 'steed, courser': an Indo-Aryan loan into Trans-Himalayan, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, 19 Dec 2019, 2009Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Major changes in Tibetan historical phonology, School of Chinese Classics, Renmin University of China, 18 Dec 2019, 2019Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A look at Kanjur stemmatics on the basis of recent discoveries. Two passages in the Vinayaksudrakavastu concerning shaving, Institut für Südasien- Tibet- und Buddhismuskunde, University of Vienna, 3 May 2019, 2019Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A cognate bestiary, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 5 Dec 2018, 2018Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The Age of Ablaut in the Tibetan verbal system, Li Fang-Kuei Society Young Scholars Symposium, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, 12-13 Aug 2018, 2018Invited Talk
• Gunkel, Dieter; Fellner, Hannes; Hill, Nathan W., *áruant- 'steed', an Indo-Iranian loan into Trans-Himalayan, Sino-Tibetan Exchanges: Routes, Goods, and Trade, Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC, 21-22 Oct 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Decipherment of the Pyu language of Ancient Burma, From Vijayapura to Ksriksetra? The beginnings of Buddhist exchange across the Bay of Bengal, EFEO, Pondicherry, India, 31 July - 4 Aug 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Pyu Inscriptions of Early Burma, Sino-Tibetan Languages: History and Structure, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena, 8 Nov 2018, 2018Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis, Quantitative pattern analysis as an aid to discovering regular sound change: a case study from the Burmish languages, The regularity principle in sound change: Approaching the Neogrammarian controversy in the 21st century., University of Cologne, Germany, 20-21 July 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan *-as > -os: a small problem, an old method, MPI für Menschheitsgeschichte, Jena, Germany, 20 June 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Using Technology Skillfully: Resources for Translators, Translation and Transmission, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA,, 31 May " 2 June 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The dark art of Chinese historical phonology: between philology and comparative reconstruction, Universität Wien, Austria, 5 May 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Hill, Nathan W.; List, Johann-Mattis "The Reconstruction of Proto-Burmish: A case study in the computational implementation of the comparative method, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, 27 Apr 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Historical Linguistics of the Trans-Himalayan Family: combining traditional methods with newly available tools, Universiteit Gent, Belgium, 27 Apr 2017, 2017Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan words for 'me' and 'us', Hamburg Universität, Germany, 6 Dec 2016, 2016Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of Tibetan to the Study of evidentiality, Edinburgh University, 27 Oct 2016, 2016Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A new look at Bailang, the second oldest Sino-Tibetan language, 5th International Conference of Oriental Studies -- Concepts, Methods, Challenges, and Perspective, Polska Akademia Nauk, Warsaw, Poland, 17-18 Oct 2016, 2016Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Explaining the irregularity of zos as the past tense of Tibetan za 'eat', Program in Indo-European Studies Weekly Graduate Seminars, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 21 Jan 2016, 2016Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The evidence for final *-r in Old Chinese, Department of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 17 Nov 2015, 2015Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan literacy, orthographic practices, and language attitudes: Reflections on priorities in research and documentation, Linguistic Documentation and Sustainability in Tibetan Minority Communities, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, 20 Aug 2015, 2018Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan phonological innovations, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 29 Apr 2015, 2015Invited Talk
• Hil, Nathan W., Current progress in Tibetan NLP and corpus linguistics, The New Historical Linguistics and the World of Annotated Corpora, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 09-13 Mar 2015, 2015Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Analogical changes in the Tibetan verb system, Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 5 Nov 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan in digital communication: Using an annotated corpus to facilitate the philological study of Tibetan texts, Digital Humanities Center, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 30 Oct 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A rule-based tagger for Classical Tibetan: Negation and verb stems classification, Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, Cambridge, MA, USA, 4 Nov 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Remarks on Bailang, the earliest attested Tibeto-Burman language, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 2 Oct 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Using an annotated corpus to facilitate the philological study of Tibetan texts, Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, UK, 4-5 Sept 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibetan in digital communication: Building a diachronic part of speech tagged corpus of Tibetan texts, Linguistic Department Seminar Series, SOAS, 6 May 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Tibétain linguistique et informatiques, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris, France, 30 Jan 2014, 2014Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Competing criteria in the analysis of Tibetan verb tense, Institut für Indologie und Zentralasien-wissenschaften, Universität Leipzig, Germany, 16 Dec 2013, 2013Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A classification of Tibetan verb stems, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 12 Dec 2013, 2013Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Proposal for the transliteration of Old Chinese: A methodological critique of current practice, Li Fang-Kuei Society Young Scholars Symposium, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 11-13 Aug 2013, 2013Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The development of a part-of-speech tag set for the preparation of a digital diachronic Tibetan corpus, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 6 May 2013, 2013Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Grammatical change as signifier to date Tibetan documents, Merkmals and Mirages: A Conference on Dating (Old) Tibetan Writing, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 26 June 2012, 2012Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Distinguishing forms of the ablative (-nas, -las) and comparative (-las, -bas) in Classical and Old Tibetan, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK, 25 Apr 2012, 2012Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The emergence of Tibetan 'dug as a 'mirative' marker, Berner Zirkel für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern, Switzerland, 21 Mar 2012, 2012Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *c in Burmese, Department of Linguistics, Edinburgh University, UK, 11 Apr 2012, 2012Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The contribution of corpus linguistics to lexicography and the future of Tibetan dictionaries, Third International Conference on Tibetan Language., Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 9-14 Dec 2011, 2011Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The Phywa and the Dmu: Comparison of two categories of gods in early Tibetan mythology, Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, 14 Nov 2011, 2011Invited Talk
• Manson, Charles; Hill, Nathan W., A Gter ma of negatives: H. E. Richardson's photographic negatives of manuscript copies of Tibetan imperial inscriptions, possibly collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang Nor bu in the 18th century CE, recently found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-Modern Buddhist World. Institute of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies, Universität Wien, Austria, 15 Oct 2011, 2011Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- An Old Tibetan mythic formula, Between Empire and phyi dar: the fragmentation and reconstruction of society and religion in post-imperial Tibet, Lumbini International Research Institute, Nepal, 3 Mar 2011, 2011Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., An introduction to Chinese historical phonology, Early China Seminar, SOAS, 26 Jan 2011, 2011Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Refining the analysis of the correspondence of Written Burmese wa to Written Tibetan o, St. Mary's University, Halifax, Canada, 26 Apr 2010, 2010Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., 'Come as lord of the black-headed' -- A Near Eastern Lehnübersetzung in Tibetan mythology, Cambridge University, UK, 12 Apr 2010, 2010Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., An argument against 'mirativity' as a valid category of linguistic analysis: hdug in 'Lhasa' Tibetan, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Netherlands, 9 Apr 2010, 2010Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A practical introduction to Chinese historical phonology, London Phonology Seminar, University College London, UK, 4 Feb 2010, 2010Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., Les pronoms personnels en tibétain ancien comme un système de classification, Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO), Paris, France, 26 May 2009, 2009Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The sku-bla ceremony: A rite of sacred Tibetan kingship, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, UK, 20 May 2009, 2009Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., A typological perspective on Classical Mongolian indirect speech, Second International Symposium on Mongolian Studies of China, Inner Mongolian Academy of Social Sciences, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia (PRC), 22 Sept 2008, 2008Invited Talk
• Hill, Nathan W., The Hphags-pa letter v- and laryngeal phenomena in Mongolian and Chinese, Workshop in Indo-European Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 17 Mar 2008, 2008Invited Talk
• List, Johann-Mattis; Hill, Nathan W., Data management in the reconstruction of proto-Burmish, Data management in Asian Humanities and Social Sciences, SOAS, University of London, 13-14 Nov 2017, 2017Oral Presentation
• Hill, Nathan W., Vowel correspondences between Tibetan and Burmese, International Burma Studies Conference, Université de Provence, Aix-Marseille I, Marseille, France, 6-9 July 2010, 2010Oral Presentation
• Hill, Nathan W., An enumeration of the sound laws leading from pre-Tibetan to Old Tibetan, 15th Himalayan Languages Symposium, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA, 30-31 July 2009, 2009Oral Presentation
• Hill, Nathan W., Personal pronouns in the Mila Rnamthar, Tibet and Her Neighbors, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 24-25 Apr 2004, 2004Oral Presentation
• Hill, Nathan W., Chungli Ao Naga texts and wordlists for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Akha, Ghoemeh; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Akha vocabulary and texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Hall, Elie; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Muak Sa-aak (duai: muak see aak) vocabulary and texts for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Zhou, Yulou; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of North Tujia (Bifzivsar) vocabulary and textual passages for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Yliniemi, Juha; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Drenjong texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Horváth, Csilla; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Mansi texts for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Du, Wenjiu; Hill, Nathan W., A Zhuang wordlist and Zhuang texts for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Chongloi, Thangcha; Hill, Nathan W., Thadou texs and wordlists for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Watkins, Justin; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Wa texts and a Wa wordlist (Bible orthography) for use in NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Watkins, Justin; Hill, Nathan W., A collection of Wa texts and a Wa wordlist (PRC orthography) for use in NLP, 2, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W.; Cooper, Douglas, A machine readable collection of lexical data on the Burmish languages, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Knights, Seth; Xun, Gong; Hill, Nathan W., Materials for an Etymological Dictionary of Burmish 2.0, 1, Zenodo, 2022Dataset, DOI
• Flanagan, Lughaidh; Liu, Xinyu; Hill, Nathan W., Selection of Han dynasty paronomastic glosses, 11, Zenodo, 2024Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W.; Nattier, Jan; Granger, Kelsey; Kollmeier, Florian, Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of An Shigao and Lokaksema, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Schuessler, Axel; Hill, Nathan, Selection of Han dynasty transcriptions of foreign names and words, 1, Zenodo, 2023Dataset, DOI
• Maung, U Nyein; Lewis-Wong, Jennifer; Zaw, Khin Khin; McCormick, Patrick; Hill, Nathan W., A Structured Corpus of Old Burmese Stone Inscriptions, 1, Zenodo, 2020Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward, A part-of-speech (POS) lexicon of Classical Tibetan for NLP, 1, Zenodo, 2017Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W.; Garrett, Edward, A part-of-speech (POS) tagged corpus of Classical Tibetan, 1, Zenodo, 2017Dataset, DOI
• Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan W.; Handy, Christopher, The Annotated Corpus of Classical Tibetan (ACTib), Part I - Segmented version, based on the BDRC digitised text collection, tagged with the Memory-Based Tagger from TiMBL., 1, Zenodo, 2017Dataset, DOI
• Meelen, Marieke; Hill, Nathan W.; Handy, Christopher, The Annotated Corpus of Classical Tibetan (ACTib), Part II - POS-tagged version, based on the BDRC digitised text collection, tagged with the Memory-Based Tagger from TiMBL, 1, Zenodo, 2017Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W.; Shrestha, Sanyukta; O'Neill, Alexander James, Diaspora Kathmandu Newar 2019, 1, Zenodo, 2024Dataset, DOI
• Barnett, Robert ; Hill, Nathan W.; Diemberger, Hildegard; Samdrup, Tsering, Named-Entity Recognition for Modern Tibetan Newspapers: Tagset, Guidelines and Training Data, 1, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W., 'A rule based Tibetan part-of-speech (POS) tagger for the creation of gold standard training data', 2017, -Software, DOI
• Engels, James; Barnett, Robert; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Hill, Nathan W., 'Tibetan_tokenizers: botok_tokenizer.py', 2024, -Software, DOI
• Engels, James; Robert Barnett; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Hill, Nathan W., 'Transkribus_utils: Paragraph Extractor', 2024, -Software, DOI
• Engels, James; Erhard, Franz Xaver; Barnett, Robert; Hill, Nathan W., 'Tibetan for Spacy 1.1', 2023, -Software, DOI
• Faggionato, Christian; Garrett, Edward; Hill, Nathan W.; Rode, Samyo; Solmsdorf, Nikolai; Wangyal, Sonam, Classical Tibetan corpus annotated for verb-argument dependency relations, 1, Zenodo, 2021Dataset, DOI
• Hill, Nathan W., (2021), 'Digitising Tibetan texts: a new resource for learners, teachers and Buddhist practitioners' [pdf], SOAS University of London, Research Excellence Framework 2021Impact Case Study, URL

I am a historical linguist specializing in the Sino-Tibetan languages. Historical linguistics retraces how languages diversify; along with genetics and archaeology, it is a way to recover human pre-history. The Sino-Tibetan family consists of 514 languages spoken across Asia. It includes some dozen literary languages like Tibetan or Chinese, but the great majority of Sino-Tibetan speakers are marginalized peoples with no tradition of writing, whose languages and ways of life are under imminent threat. These languages deserve the kind of sustained attention so far only given to Indo-European languages like Greek and Sanskrit; my goal is to facilitate this. My work as an individual charts the histories of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, and reconstructs their common ancestor. A decade of research on specific problems in each language and their comparison culminated in a 2019 monograph published with Cambridge. This book is already a touchstone in the field and will soon be published in Chinese translation. In an attempt to move the discipline beyond its present impasse, my current book project interrogates the primary sources and methods used to reconstruct Old Chinese in order to tease out where different scholarly traditions agree or not. As a doctoral supervisor and postdoctoral mentor, I also facilitate the documentation and revitalization of the many Sino-Tibetan languages that remain undescribed and at the verge of extinction. To date my postdocs and PhD students have together documented eight endangered languages spoken across Pakistan, India, Nepal, China and Burma. As a collaborator I contribute to large-scale projects that integrate computational linguistics with philological research, developing resources and tools that benefit both academic researchers and minority language speaker communities. As principal or co-investigator I have served on projects attracting over €11 million. These projects have developed Natural Language Processing tools, including for Tibetan part-of-speech tagging, Newar handwritten text recognition, and, with Microsoft, mobile phone predictive keyboards for 13 minority languages of China and India. Google and Microsoft's use of data from these projects to develop products for Tibetan speakers served as a case study for research impact in the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF2021), earning the highest available `four star" score. My influence in shaping linguistics and Asian Studies has been widely recognized. I participated as an expert on research in the re-accreditation committees for France's premier area studies university (Inalco) and its national research laboratory in Asian linguistics (CRLAO). I am Vice President of the Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics. The European Research Council (ERC) and the national research councils of ten countries have asked me to review project proposals. I have also served on the advisory panels of four ERC projects and on the editorial boards of 12 journals. I am also a productive scholar, having authored 110 peer-reviewed publications, including three books and 69 articles"15 since 2021. I have 318 citations on Scopus, 215 in the last five years, and an H-index of 9, alongside 1,692 citations on Google Scholar with an H-index of 23.

• Title

  An audio-visual archive and searchable corpus of Kaike, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Dolpa, Nepal
  Summary
  Funding Agency

  Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  Date From

  1 Oct 2017
  Date To

  30 Jun 2018
• Title

  Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State
  Summary

  The Gupta dynasty dominated South Asia during the 4th and 5th centuries. Their period was marked by political stability and an astonishing florescence in every field of endeavor. The Gupta kingdom and its networks had an enduring impact on India and a profound reach across Central and Southeast Asia in a host of cultural, religious and socio-political spheres. Sometimes characterized as a 'Golden Age', this was a pivotal moment in Asian history. The Guptas have received considerable scholarly attention over the last century, as have, separately, the kingdoms of Central and Southeast Asia. Recent advances notwithstanding, knowledge and research activity are fragmented by entrenched disciplinary protocols, distorted by nationalist historiographies and constrained by regional languages and associated cultural and political agendas. Hemmed in by modern intellectual, geographical and political boundaries, the diverse cultures, complex polities and varied networks of the Gupta period remain specialist subjects, little-mentioned outside area studies and traditional disciplinary frameworks. The aim of this project is to work beyond these boundaries for the first time and so recover this profoundly influential dispensation, presenting it as a vibrant entity with connections across several regions and sub-continental areas. To address this aim, three PIs have formed an interdisciplinary team spanning linguistics, history, religious studies, geography, archaeology, Indology, Sinology and GIS/IT technologies. This team will establish a scientific laboratory in London that will generate the synergies needed to delineate and assess the significance of the Gupta Age and its pan-Asian impacts. The project's wider objective is to place Central,South and Southeast Asia on the global historical stage, significantly influence practices in Asian research and support EU leadership in Asian studies.
  Funding Agency

  European Research Council
  Date From

  Sept 2014
  Date To

  Aug 2020
• Title

  Documentation and Description of the Laitu Language with a focus on endangered cultural practices
  Summary
  Funding Agency

  Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  Date From

  1 Apr 2018
  Date To

  31 Mar 2020
• Title

  Han Phonology: When Chinese Became Chinese
  Summary

  Chinese is famous for its short simple words, its tones, and its simple grammar, but in the distant past Chinese was a very different language; Old Chinese (1300-100 BCE) lacked tones, had consonant clusters as impressive as those of German or Georgian, and it used prefixes and suffixes to form new words. By 602 CE, the date of the earliest Chinese pronunciation dictionary, Middle Chinese was already recognizably a form of the language we known today. How did Chinese change so much? The Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) holds the key; it was the first enduring empire in Chinese history, and among the most formative periods for Chinese thought and literature. At this time, the Confucian cultural milieu accompanying classical scholarship thrived. The Confucian classics themselves were edited and (literally) set in stone, while poetry and belletristic prose flourished. The Han also saw unprecedented exposure to and influences from foreign cultures, from grapes to backgammon, with Buddhism standing out as the period's most abiding foreign influence. This project will produce a Handbook of Han Chinese Phonology that will supersede the previous two book length studies of Han phonology, published respectively in 1958 and 1983. By collecting and formalizing existing knowledge of sound change during the Han period in a computer readable format, we will be able to rigorously test competing ideas and produce a reliable foundation for future progress. We will also applying state-of-the-art network analysis to the linguistic data of both well known and newly unearthed texts to pinpoint the time, place, and social milieu of known changes. Using this fresh collection of evidence and these new methods, we will decide among controversial proposals and make new discoveries. We will give the most thorough and empirical treatment so far of regional and social variation in speech over the period. In particular, by comparing the pronunciations implied by the rhymes in poetry written by Confucian literati and the pronunciations implied by the transcription of Indic terms in Buddhist texts, we will reveal the language systems of these two distinct religious communities.
  Funding Agency

  Arts and Humanities Research Council Research
  Date From

  May 2021
  Date To

  Apr 2025
• Title

  Tibetan in Digital Communication: Corpus Linguistics and Lexicography
  Summary

  In age, breadth and diversity of genre, Tibetan literature is in every way comparable to English. The Tibetan alphabet was invented in 650 CE. The earliest currently available securely dateable document dates to ca. 763 CE. Literary production has continued from that time unabated until today. Yet, the lexicographical resources of Tibetan are very inadequate and vastly inferior to what is available to English speakers. In total, students of Tibetan can draw on about a dozen dictionaries, most for Classical Tibetan. The scope of these lexicons tends to be poorly defined, and none of them meets the standards of scientific lexicography. Moreover, there is not a single work that covers the earliest period of Tibetan literature, Old Tibetan (650-1000 CE). The corpus and tools we propose to create will serve as the first step to advance the compilation of a comprehensive historical Tibetan dictionary akin to the Oxford English Dictionary. In order to achieve this, we propose to produce a large corpus of Tibetan texts spanning the language's entire history, drawn from Old, Classical and Modern Tibetan. In the past, scholars used laborious collections of slips organised and stored in vast filing cabinets in order to compile large dictionaries. Advances in computational linguistics mean that this work can now be achieved more thoroughly and effectively through the creation of annotated digital corpora. But our corpus, once carefully analysed and tagged, will not only pave the way for the compilation of Tibetan dictionaries of hitherto inconceivable calibre, but it will also prepare the ground for a wide range of other significant research initiatives. By mounting it on the Web, scholars from a wide range of disciplines (history, religion, literature, linguistics, etc.) working with Tibetan language materials will be able to search it and use its content for their own research. It is thus likely to become foundational to a vast array of research initiatives, benefiting many different constituencies in academia. Outside academia, in the modern world of electronic communication, our corpus will lay the foundation for the creation of new digital technologies for Tibetan (text messaging, automated translation, etc.). The high investment required to develop language software leaves languages without commercial or political power isolated and poorly resourced. Digital communication technologies are built on basic language processing tools (eg, word-segmentation programmes, part-of-speech taggers) of the very type we propose to create. Our work will reduce the cost to develop such technologies and thus attract commercial interest. Although Tibetan is spoken by more than two million people, it is barely represented in electronic media as a spoken language. We seek to remedy this by creating an electronic resource that will restore to Tibetans, irrespective of their residence or adopted nationality, the choice to use their language as they see fit in a world that is increasingly shaped by digital communication.
  Funding Agency

  Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant
  Date From

  Sept 2012
  Date To

  Aug 2015
• Title

  Documentary Corpus of Chhitkul, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of Northern India
  Summary
  Funding Agency

  Endangered Languages Documentation Project
  Date From

  1 Jun 2018
  Date To

  30 Sep 2019
• Title

  The Emergence of Egophoricity: a diachronic investigation into the marking of the conscious self
  Summary

  This project looks at the way certain Tibetan and Newar varieties express the perspective of the speaker in the sentence. In Lhasa Tibetan, for example, the auxiliary verb 'yin' can be used in sentences where the speaker is the subject (nga em-chi yin '*I'm* a doctor'), if the speaker wants to identify their personal relation or possession ('di nga'i bu-mo yin 'This is *my* daughter') or if the speaker chooses to emphasise who performed an action ('di khyed-rang-gi gsol-ja yin 'This is your tea [that *I* have made for you]'). Other Tibetan varieties, such as Jirel or South Mustang Tibetan also exhibit egophoric markers like Lhasa Tibetan 'yin', but not always in the same contexts. In Newar varieties that are also spoken in Nepal, however, egophoric marking consists of long vowels in verbal endings rather than separate (auxiliary) verbs (ji Manaj napalan-aa 'I (the speaker) met Manoj as planned' vs. ji Manaj napalan-a 'I met Manoj by coincidence'). Finally, in older stages of both Tibetan and Newar varieties, this egophoric marking cannot be found. The central question that this project aims to answer is how and why specific grammatical markers to indicate the speaker's involvement emerge over time in ways that slightly differ, even in closely related languages. What subtle grammatical clues can be found in olders stages of these languages that in later stages result in egophoric marking? In this project we first investigate how Present-Day Tibetan and Newar varieties grammatically express the speaker's involvement. For this purpose we will create annotated corpora: digital text collections enriched with linguistic information about the structure and meaning of each element in the sentence. Because there is no data available yet for the highly endangered Lalitpur Newar variety, we will conduct fieldwork in Nepal to document the language and collect texts for our corpora. We then add the same linguistic information to historical texts. Older archive texts in South Mustang Tibetan, for example, will be compared to 18-19th texts written in standard Classical Tibetan to investigate the development of the Present-Day Lhasa Tibetan egophoric marker 'byung', which indicates the speaker is the recipient of an action (khong gis ngar yige btang byung 'He sent *me* a letter.'). Present-Day South Mustang Tibetan also has a verb 'byung', which goes back to Old and Classical Tibetan 'byung' meaning 'receive, get'. But unlike Lhasa Tibetan, this verb in South Mustang Tibetan has not changed into an egophoric auxiliary verb. Because of the extensive and consistent linguistic annotation of our corpora, we will be able to systematically study subtle differences in use of verbs like 'byung'. Since our corpora will not only contain morphosyntactic annotation, but information about meaning and function in discourse context as well, we will be in a unique position to investigate complex grammatical phenomena like egophoricity. Investigating this in a historical context gives us the opportunity to test theories of languages change that make predictions about triggers and mechanisms of change in particular. Are language-internal factors (e.g. changes in phonology) responsible for the emergence of egophoric marking, can language-external factors (language contact) play a role and/or can we observe a combination of factors in these languages that have throughout history been spoken by people in close promixity in Nepal? Finally, since even closely-related Tibetan and Newar varieties exhibit some significant differences, comparison with egophoric marking on other languages can provide further clues on this complex phenomenon. In the final year of the project, we will therefore put our findings from Tibetan and Newar in crosslinguistic perspective.
  Funding Agency

  Arts and Humanities Research Council Research
  Date From

  Oct 2021
  Date To

  Sept 2025
• Title

  Reconstruction of Proto-Western Kho-Bwa
  Summary
  Funding Agency

  Swiss National Science Foundation
  Date From

  1 Sep 2018
  Date To

  29 Feb 2020
• Title

  Divergent Discourses: Processes of Narrative Construction in Tibet, 1955-62
  Summary

  The Divergent Discourses project is an international, collaborative UK-German research study of a conflict that began in the high Himalayas in the 1950s and led to nearly two decades of armed conflict. That conflict continues today in the form of disputes over ideas and narratives between the Chinese government and the exile Tibetan community, together with recurrent unrest and protests within Tibet and protracted border tensions between China and its neighbours. Not long after Chairman Mao sent Chinese troops to annexe Tibet in 1950, the Dalai Lama, the traditional ruler of Tibet, fled with some 80,000 Tibetans to India. In response, Chinese officials produced millions of words in newsprint, historical tracts, propaganda leaflets and books to justify their claim to Tibet and condemn the old regime. From India, exile Tibetans produced refugee accounts, testimonies, memoirs, and histories of Tibet to counter China's claims. Materials of this kind, which are in large part polemical, are not often treated as major sources for historians. But the development of digital humanities and computational research techniques means that they can now be mined in numerous ways to extract details about events, individuals and ideas that would otherwise be little noticed in the texts within which they are buried. With these new research tools, innumerable pieces of data and information can be brought together from multiple sources, revealing new information and offering new insights into the history of the time. These innovative tools allow close study of the two competing discourses that emerged in the 1950s, each with their own account of Tibetan history, identity, and traditions. The divergence between these accounts has since shaped China's policies in Tibet, its tense relations with India, its strained relations with the US and the West, its response to recurrent protests by Tibetans within Tibet, and the six-decades-long failure of the exile and Chinese leaderships to reach a settlement. The project, which will be led jointly by an expert in modern Tibetan literature in Leipzig and a modern Tibetan historian working with a historical linguist in London, will collect almost entirely overlooked documents from libraries in Leipzig, Berlin, Oxford, Prague and elsewhere, including propaganda materials and newspapers from the 1950s. By adapting existing software tools, the project will develop computational tools that will make it possible for the first time for modern Tibetan texts to be compiled into a digital corpus of historical materials, where they can be annotated and cross-referenced to allow sophisticated searches and study. The three-year project will lead to publications with new insights about the events that led to the split between the Chinese and Tibetan governments in the 1950s, about the arguments and narratives that they produced, and about the ways in which this cleavage changed subsequent events. The project will also create a website with examples of typical documents from the period with English translations, a database of events and names extracted from the documents, and online access to the texts and data collected by the project.
  Funding Agency

  Arts and Humanities Research Council and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
• Title

  Gyalrongic unveiled: Languages, Heritage, Ancestry
  Summary

  The secrets of human ancestry are often hidden in languages. Languages exhibiting most information about history are often endangered and understudied. Gyalrongic, spoken in the Tibetan region of Sichuan, China, is such a language group in the Sino-Tibetan family. They are extremely vulnerable and poorly understood, exhibiting an archaism surpassing even ancient languages like Chinese and Tibetan. Understanding the genetic position of Gyalrongic, its subgrouping, and the reconstruction of Proto- Gyalrongic is vital for retracing Sino-Tibetan ancestry. Thus, this research approaches the history of Gyalrongic by integrating lexical and morphological data of more than twenty varieties, freshly collected from the field. The project will carefully curate and publish the data. Traditional historical linguistic theories will combine force with state-of-the-art computational methods to achieve the research goals, namely, Gyalrongic phylogeny and Proto-Gyalrongic reconstruction. This research meets the urgent need of integrating traditional theories into computational approaches to historical linguistics, marking considerable progress in Sino-Tibetan studies. This research will also benefit fellow linguists as well as archaeologists, anthropologists and botanists in the same region, mutually confirming, challenging and refining their research, and foster a greater appreciation of cultural heritage and understanding of identities.
  Funding Agency

  Science Foundation Ireland and Irish Research Council
  Date From

  01 Mar 2022
  Date To

  28 Feb 2026
• Title

  Kinship Systems in Gyalrong: History and Transformation
  Summary

  The Na-Qiangic (NQ) languages are an endangered subgroup in Sino-Tibetan (ST), spoken by ethnic minorities in the Hengduan Mountains of Southwest China. The NQ-speaking area is home to great diversity of kinship and marriage patterns, where one finds zouhun, a non-conjugal visiting system, practiced by matrilineal communities. Many questions remain unanswered: Are matrilineal kinship and zouhun vestiges of once more widespread practices? Did these diverse kinship patterns originate from a common ancestral system? What are the factors leading to the diversity of family structures in this area? To answer these questions, KinSiGHT focuses on the Gyalrongic (NQ)-speaking area in northwestern Sichuan, and uses linguistic methods to trace transformations of kinship systems of the Gyalrongs. The two interlocking themes of this investigation will be (i) the directionality of transformation from the Proto-Gyalrongic kinship system to the synchronic systems, and (ii) correlations among historical changes in kinship systems, marriage patterns and NQ phylogeny. KinSiGHT will advance our understanding of the Gyalrongic kinship patterns and their values in revealing the origin of family structure in the Hengduan Mountains, as well as general principles of kinship transformation. KinSiGHT will enhance collaborations between linguists and anthropologists. During this fellowship, the PI, Shuya Zhang, will be based at the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies (TCD), where she will benefit from instructions from Prof. Nathan Hill in practicing historical linguistic methods. During the secondment at the Center for Himalayan Studies (CNRS Paris), she will work with Dr. Stéphane Gros, a prominent anthropologist specializing in ethnic minorities in Southwest China. The fellowship will enable the PI to become a leading female scholar in ST kinship studies, and will position her to prepare a competitive ERC grant application, while opening up new career opportunities in ethnological museums.
  Funding Agency

  European Commission
  Date From

  1 Sept 2023
  Date To

  31 Aug 2025
• Title

  Substrate language influence in the southern Himalayas
  Summary

  The Kusunda language of Nepal is spoken by only two people and its imminent extinction entails an irreplaceable loss to humanity. Particularly because, like Basque in Europe, Kusunda is a language isolate: a language unknown to be affiliated to any other language or language family of the world. As Basque may once have been spoken more widely across Europe, Kusunda speakers may once have lived throughout the southern Himalayan region, an area of exceptionally high linguistic diversity. This research will identify the linguistic traces left by Kusunda as lower prestige `substrate" language in later, more dominant and higher prestige `superstrate" languages, such as Tshangla and the Kho-Bwa varieties, spoken over 1,300 kilometres away in Northeast India. Thus, this research will provide new insights into the prehistory of Asia at a time depth and from a perspective not yet explored before and contribute to the developing sub-discipline of substrate language studies.
  Funding Agency

  British Academy
  Date From

  1 Jan 2021
  Date To

  31 Dec 2023
• Title

  Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto-Bodish reconstruction
  Summary

  TOMB (Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs. Language conservatism of religious writings in the service of Proto- Bodish reconstruction) aims to yield a range of new contributions to our understanding of the Old Tibetan language and funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau by investigating ancient records concerned with non-Buddhist funerary rituals. In addition, the project will uncover important linguistic links to other regional language communities and will establish the first testable hypotheses about the genetic relationship of Tibetan languages. The synchronic perspective of the philological study will be complemented with historico-linguistic analysis. TOMB will specifically focus on translating documents from the Old Tibetan funerary corpus that have never been translated before. These manuscripts are remarkable for several reasons: 1) they provide insights into funerary rituals that did not survive beyond the Tibetan Empire; 2) they reflect elements of ritual culture shared with other non-Tibetan speaking groups in the region; 3), they offer evidence of earlier, pre-historical stages of the Tibetan language; and 4) they give us an opportunity to enhance our understanding of Tibetan languages and to uncover their genetic links to related languages. Through a comprehensive analysis of the corpus from both historical and text-linguistic perspectives, we will gain insights into archaisms that can be identified as features of pre-historical Tibetan. This foundational work will set the stage for reconstructing Proto-Tibetan. Identifying and describing these features will in turn contribute to the reconstruction of Proto-Bodish, the presumed ancestral language of Tibetan, East-Bodish, and Tamangic languages. The innovative approach to ritual textual sources as reservoirs of pre-historical linguistic forms tackles thus far unexplored fields of research and promises to enrich our understanding of the Tibetan non-Buddhist religious culture.
  Funding Agency

  European Commission
  Date From

  1 Sept 2024
  Date To

  31 Aug 2026
• Title

  Pre-history of the Sino-Tibetan languages: the sound laws relating Old Burmese, Old Chinese, and Old Tibetan
  Summary

  The history of the languages of Europe is understood stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records. This feat is achieved by the discovery of sound laws through the comparison of attested languages, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Using such laws one can reconstruct not only the prehistoric language that gave rise to all of the Indo-European languages, but also explore the religion, society, and material culture of the speakers of this language.
  Funding Agency

  British Academy
  Date From

  Dec 2011
  Date To

  Aug 2014

• Li Fang-Kuei Society of Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar 2018
• Li Fang-Kuei Society of Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar 2013
• China Times Young Scholars Award 2008

• Philological Society
• Peer Review College, Arts and Humanities Research Council Current
• Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland
• International Association for Tibetan Studies
• Signet Society of Arts and Letters

• Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (associate editor) 2020-2022
• Invited by the European Commission to participate in the workshop 'Research Data Management: from planning to sharing and reuse of research data' (11 Sept 2018, Brussels), to advise on the development of data management guidelines for ERC grants. 2018
• University of Hong Kong (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2022, 2024
• Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (deputy editor) 2018-2021
• Expert assessor, with special responsibility for research, in the re-accreditation of INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), 2024, and CRLAO (the Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale), 2017, on behalf of the HCERES (Haut Conseil de l'évaluation de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur). These five-yearly assessments are conducted by a committee of six, who prepare a pre-report on the basis of full access to internal documents, conduct a three-day site visit, and submit a final report to the French ministry of education. 2024, 2017
• University of Virginia (external evaluator for promotion) 2013
• Oxford University (external examiner for MPhil in Tibetan Studies) 2013-2016
• Language Documentation & Description (editorial board member) 2016-
• Archiv Orientalní (editorial board member) 2019-
• Himalaya (editorial board member) 2013-2017
• International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Reconstruction (editorial board member) 2019-
• Central Asiatic Journal (editorial board member) 2013-
• Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (regional editor) 2012-
• Member of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College (2020-); college members are the Council's first port of call for assessing project proposals and from time to time also serve on the quarterly panels that make final funding decisions. Likewise in the peer review college of Research Foundation -- Flanders (FWO) (2021-2023). 2020-
• Academia Sinica (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2024
• Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics (vice president) 2021-
• Served on the advisory board of four European Research Council (ERC) grants in linguistics and Buddhist studies: the Advanced Grant "Buddhism's Early Spread to Tibet: Dunhuang and the Influence of Sinitic Scriptures" (Jonathan Silk, PI, 2024-2029), the Advanced Grant "Open Philology: The Composition of Buddhist Scriptures" (Jonathan Silk, PI, 2018-2023), the Consolidator Grant "ProduSemy: Productive Signs. A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Evolutionary, Typological, and Cognitive Dimensions of Word Families" (Johann-Mattis List, PI, 2023-2027), and the Starting Grant "Computer-Assisted Language Comparison" (Johann-Mattis List, PI, 2017-2022). 2018-
• Rocznik Orientalistyczny (editorial board member) 2022-
• Oklahoma State University (external evaluator for tenure and promotion) 2016
• University College Dublin (external examiner for Asian languages) 2024-2026
• University College Cork (external on hiring panel) 2021
• Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics (forum editor) 2019-
• I acted as an expert witness for the Chief State Solicitor"s Office of Ireland in a High Court case concerning the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters in the new Chinese Leaving Cert. Over the course of a year, I attended in-person and online meetings, took numerous phone calls, and had extensive email correspondences; I prepared two detailed reports for the court, the second responded to affidavits from the opposing side. My reports aimed to contextualize the debate for the court. They covered international pedagogical practices, research on Chinese teaching, and the Europe-wide discussion of establishing CEFR benchmarks for Chinese. 2023-2024
• Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (managing editor) 2016-2022
• Corpus Linguistics Database (advisor) 2019-2022
• I have reviewed for a total of 54 different journals (too many to list individually here), including high impact and respected venues such as Science Advances, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Language, and Diachronica. 2009-
• Open Research Europe - Linguistic Diversity (guest advisor) 2022-
• Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale (editorial board member) 2024-