Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology and Sino-Tibetan languages.
Bodman was born in Chicago in 1913.
He entered Harvard in 1935, but left after one year and spent several years doing office work and traveling in Europe.
He joined the United States Navy in 1941, and was assigned to Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor in early 1942 to join the team working to decipher Japanese naval codes.
He retired from the navy in 1945 with the rank of Lieutenant commander.[1]
After leaving the navy, Bodman enrolled at Yale, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., with a study of the phonology of the Shiming.[1] While at Yale he was a student of Li Fang-Kuei, who was a visiting professor there at the time.[2] He worked at the Foreign Service Institute from 1950 until 1962, rising to head to the Department of Far Eastern languages.[1]
Between 1951 and 1952, he was in Malaya on loan to the British government, where he created a course on Hokkien that is still a definitive reference.[1][3]
In 1962, Bodman joined the faculty of Cornell University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1979.[1][3]
He continued to do fieldwork on Tibeto-Burman languages and Min dialects.[1]
In an unpublished paper presented at Princeton in 1971, he proposed a novel six-vowel system for a stage of Chinese prior to the Old Chinese of the earliest records.[4]
This system was later developed as a proposal for Old Chinese itself by Bodman's student William Baxter, and independently by Sergei Starostin and Zhengzhang Shangfang, and is now widely accepted.[4]
He marshaled his ideas on Old Chinese and its relationship with Sino-Tibetan in an influential treatment published in 1980.[4]
Later he published a series of papers reconstructing the history of the Min group.[3]
^ abcdefLeed, Richard L.; Van Coetsem, Frans; Gair, James W. (1997). "Bodman, Nicholas Cleaveland July 27, 1913 - June 29, 1997" (Document). Office of the Dean of the University Faculty, Cornell University. hdl:1813/18412.
^"Linguistics east and west: American Indian, Sino-Tibetan, and Thai, Fang-kuei Li". oac.cdlib.org. Retrieved 26 March 2022.
^ abcBaxter, William H. (1999). "Nicholas C. Bodman, 1913–1997". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 27 (1): 190–191. JSTOR 23756752.
^ abcCoblin, W. South (1996). "Review of Proto-Chinese and Sino-Tibetan by Nicholas Bodman, translated by Pan Wuyun and Feng Zheng". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 24 (2): 391–395. JSTOR 23753960.
Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study of historical Chinese...
Roman Catholic bishop NicholasBodman (1913–1997), American linguist Nikolaus Bodman (1903–1988), German nobleman Roger Bodman (born 1952), American politician...
and Sanxiang dialect, spoken in Sanxiang in the south. According to NicholasBodman, the Longdu and Nanlang dialects belong to the Eastern Min group, while...
independently developed by William Baxter (building on a proposal by NicholasBodman) and by Sergei Starostin. In 1980, he joined the Chinese Academy of...
was referred to as Two Kings, Three Reverences [zh]. According to NicholasBodman, the Zhou appear to have spoken a language largely similar in vocabulary...
and *ua. In the early 1970s, NicholasBodman proposed a six-vowel system for an earlier stage of Chinese. Applying Bodman's suggestion to Old Chinese, Zhengzhang...
G. Pulleyblank. The Shiming glosses were collected and studied by NicholasBodman. Weldon South Coblin collected all the remaining glosses and transcriptions...
Zhengzhang Shangfang, Sergei Starostin and William Baxter (following NicholasBodman) independently argued that these rhyme groups should be split, refining...
sinologists which included Yuen Ren Chao and his daughter Rulan Chao Pian, NicholasBodman, Milena Dolezelova, and Wolfram Eberhard, during a meeting at Cornell...
Glossika. Archived from the original on 2009-04-29. Retrieved 2009-03-25. Bodman, Nicholas C. (1982). "The Namlong Dialect, a Northern Min Outlier in Zhongshan...
Altman, Lawrence Summers, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Kenneth W. Dam, and Samuel Bodman. The office of Deputy Secretary is the successor of the "Under Secretary...
the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation. The Heterodox Academy website was launched with 25 members in...
1163/2405478X-00802003. ISSN 2405-478X. Retrieved 11 October 2023. Bodman, Nicholas C. (1984). "The Namlong Dialect, a Northern Min Outlier in Zhongshan...
the original on 20 August 2008. "Shepton Mallet: Leg Square (C) Martin Bodman :: Geograph Britain and Ireland". Geograph.org.uk. Retrieved 17 April 2017...
unfeeling. It is to this lukewarm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes Reynolds' never having...
Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide. ISBN 1-557-29043-1. Bodman, Nicholas Cleaveland (1954). A Linguistic Study of the "Shih Ming": Initials...
Glossika. Archived from the original on 2010-08-20. Retrieved 2009-03-26. Bodman, Nicholas C. (1982). "The Namlong Dialect, a Northern Min Outlier in Zhongshan...
Washington Post (Narrated slideshow). Retrieved December 18, 2007. Lemann, Nicholas (May 7, 2001). "The Quiet Man". The New Yorker. Archived from the original...
Herbert R.; Billstein, Reinhold; Fings, Karola; Kugler, Anita; Levis, Nicholas (eds.). "Profits "Über Alles!" American Corporations and Hitler". Labour...
major participant in the Baylor University basketball scandal Samuel W. Bodman (1961): former United States Secretary of Energy (2005–2009), former Deputy...
Global Information