Laurent Sagart
| Laurent Sagart | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1951 (age 65–66) Paris, France |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater |
University of Paris 7 (Ph.D.) University of Provence (doctorat d'État) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| Main interests | Chinese linguistics, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian |
Laurent Sagart (born 1951) is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO - UMR 8563) unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Born in Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Paris 7 and his doctorat d'État in 1990 at University of Aix-Marseille 1. His early work focused on Chinese dialectology. He then turned his attention to Old Chinese, attempting a reconstruction of Old Chinese that separated word roots and affixes. His recent work, in collaboration with William H. Baxter, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds on earlier scholarship and in addition takes into account paleography, phonological distinctions in conservative Chinese dialects (Min, Waxiang) as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietnamese, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Tai-Kadai. A reconstruction of 4000 Chinese characters has been published online. Their 2014 book has been awarded the Bloomfield prize of the Linguistic Society of America.
Sagart is probably best known for his proposal of the Sino-Austronesian language family. He considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the Sino-Tibetan languages, and also treats the Tai–Kadai languages as a sister group to the Malayo-Polynesian languages within the Austronesian language family. Inclusion of Tai-Kadai into Austronesian is based on the recognition of post-Proto-Austronesian innovations, notably in the numeral system, that Tai-Kadai shares with proto-Malayo-Polynesian. The nesting pattern formed by these innovations in the Formosan languages allowed Sagart to present a phylogeny of the basal region of the Austronesian family tree in which Malayo-Polynesian is not a primary branch of the family, as in Robert Blust's scheme, but a low-level branch within the most nested Formosan subgroup.
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