Jerry Norman

Jerry Lee Norman (July 16, 1936 – July 7, 2012) was an American sinologist and linguist who is known for his study of Min Chinese dialects and the Manchu language. He is the author of a Manchu-English dictionary.

Biography

Norman was born in Watsonville, California in 1936, and went to the University of California at Berkeley where he studied Chinese under Chao Yuen Ren.^[1] In 1965 he had worked with Leo Chen on an introduction to the Fuzhou dialect and a Fuzhou-English glossary, and in 1966 Norman joined the Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton University as a staff linguist.^[2] He subsequently went to Taiwan to engage in field research on Taiwanese, and in 1969 he completed his PhD at Berkeley, with a dissertation on the Jianyang dialect of Fujian.^[3] In 1972, he joined the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, retiring in 1998. In a series of papers from 1973, Norman applied the comparative method to popular forms in modern Min dialects to reconstruct proto-Min.

He died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in Seattle on July 7, 2012.^[4]

Works

• 1965. With Leo Chen. Foochow-English Glossary. San Francisco State College.
• 1965. With Leo Chen. An Introduction to the Foochow Dialect. San Francisco State College.
• 1967. A Manchu-English Dictionary. Taipei.
• 1969. The Kienyang Dialect of Fukien. University of California, Berkeley. PhD dissertation.
• 1973. "Tonal Development in Min"; Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1–2: 222–238.
• 1974. "The Initials of Proto-Min"; Journal of Chinese Linguistics 2-1: 27–36.
• 1974. "Structure of Sibe Morphology"; Central Asian Journal.
• 1976. With Mei Tsu-lin. "The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China: Some Lexical Evidence"; Monumenta Serica 32: 274–301, JSTOR 40726203.
• 1978. A Concise Manchu-English Lexicon. University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-95574-2.
• 1979. "Chronological Strata in the Min Dialects"; Fangyan 方言 1979.4: 268–274.
• 1980. "Yongan fanyan" 永安方言; Shumu Jikan 书目季刊 14–2: 113–165.
• 1981. "The Proto-Min Finals"; 中央研究院国际汉学会议论文集 语言文字组: 35–73.
• 1984. "Three Min Etymologies"; Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 13–2: 175–189. doi:10.3406/clao.1984.1155.
• 1986. "闽北方言的第三套清塞音和清擦塞音"; Zhongguo Yuwen 中国语文 1986.1: 38–41.
• 1988. Chinese. Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
• 1991. "The Mǐn Dialects in Historical Perspective"; Languages and Dialects of China: 325–360.
• 1995. With Weldon South Coblin. "A New Approach to Chinese Historical Linguistics"; Journal of the American Oriental Society 115–4: 576–584.
• 1996. "Tonal Development in the Jennchyan Dialect"; Yuen Ren Society Treasury of Chinese Dialect Data 2: 7–41.
• 2000. With Gilbert Louis Mattos. translation of Chinese Writing by Qiu Xigui. Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. ISBN 978-1-55729-071-7
• 2002. "A Glossary of the Lianduentsuen Dialect"; Short Chinese Dialect Reports 1: 339–394.
• 2006. "Min Animal Body Parts"; Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics 1–1: 133–143.
• 2007. "汉语方言田野调查与音韵学"; Beijing Daxue Xuebao 北京大学学报 44.2: 91–94.
• 2013. A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary. Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 978-0-674-07213-8

References