Download or read book Studies in the Historical Phonology of Asian Languages written by William G. Boltz and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume owes its genesis to a series of lectures on various aspects of the historical phonology of Asian languages, sponsored by the Asian Linguistics Colloquium of the Department of Asian Languages and Literature of the University of Washington, in Seattle. The volume includes papers on both theoretical and applied aspects of Asian linguistics, and topics examined include vowel harmony, dialect variation and “inherent variability”, historical reconstruction based on written records, historical reconstruction based on the comparative method, accentology, and language standardization. While some of the papers are comparative in nature, others deal with effects of language contact on phonological systems. Languages and language families dealt with are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Altaic, Chinese, Uralic, Korean, and Tai.