André-Georges Haudricourt

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André-Georges Haudricourt (1911 - 1996) was a French anthropologist and linguist.

A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in Picardie. He obtained his baccalauréat in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique (The National Institude of Agriculture) in 1931. He studied Genetics in Paris (1932) and Leningrad (1934-1935). In 1940, he was employed by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, working at the Department of Botany. He switched to the Department of Linguistics in 1945. His studies was first focused on the Romance languages. Soon he became interested in the Asian languages. He went aboard to Hanoi, working at the library of the École française d'Extrême-Orient from 1948 to 1949.

Haudricourt made contributions to the study of Historical Chinese phonology with his pioneering article L'origine des tons en vietnamien, published in Journal Asiatique in 1954. The article inspired future scholars to suggest that Old Chinese is toneless.

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