Roy Andrew Miller

Roy Andrew Miller (born September 5, 1924) is a linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages.

Miller was born in Winona, Minnesota, USA, on September 5th, 1924. In 1953, he completed a PhD in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University in New York. Long a student of languages, his early work in the 1950s was largely with Chinese and Tibetan. For example, in 1969 he wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the Tibeto-Burman Languages of South Asia.

He was Professor of Linguistics at the International Christian University in Tokyo from 1955 to 1963. Subsequently he taught at Yale University; between 1964 and 1970, he was chairman of the department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures. From 1970 until 1989 he held a similar post at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since then, he has taught in Europe, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia.

Prof. Miller has written extensively on the Japanese language, from "A Japanese Reader" (1963) and "The Japanese Language" (1967) to "Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages" (1971) and "Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese" (1986). He later broadened his scope by linking Korean both to Japanese and Altaic, most notably in "Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic" (1996).

On the occasion of Miller's 75th birthday, Professors Karl Menges and Nelly Naumann prepared a Festschrift highlighting his career and including articles on Altaic languages.

Selected works by Roy Andrew Miller

* 1955a. "Studies in spoken Tibetan I: phonemics." In "Journal of the American Oriental Society" 75: 46-51.

* 1955b. Review of 稻葉正就 Inaba Shōju, チベット語古典文法学 / "Chibettogo koten bunpōgaku" ["Classical Tibetan Language Grammatical Studies"] (昭和 Shōwa 29), Kyoto: 法藏館 Hōzōkan, 1954. "Language" 31: 481-482.

* 1955c. "Notes on the Lhasa dialect of the early ninth century." "Oriens" 8: 284-291.

* 1955d. "The significance for comparative grammar of some ablauts in the Tibetan number-system". "T'oung-pao" 43: 287-296.

* 1956. "Segmental diachronic phonology of a Ladakh (Tibetan) dialect." In "Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morganländischen Gesellschaft" 106: 345-362.

* 1962. "The Si-tu Mahapandita on Tibetan phonology." 湯浅八郎博士古稀記念論文集 / "Yuasa Hachirō hakushi koki kinen ronbunshu / To Dr. Hachiro Yusasa; A collection of Papers commemorating his Seventieth Anniversary", 921-933. Tokyo: 国際基督教大学 / Kokusai Kirisutokyō Daigaku.

* 1966. "Early evidence for vowel harmony in Tibetan." In "Language" 42: 252-277.

* 1967a. "The Japanese Language." Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.

* 1967b. [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-8507(196703)43%3A1%3C278%3AOJPATK%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y "Old Japanese phonology and the Korean-Japanese relationship."]

* 1967c. "Some problems in Tibetan transcription of Chinese from Tun-huang." In "Monumenta Serica" 27: 123-48 (publ. 1969).

* 1968. Review of András Róna-Tas, "Tibeto-Mongolica: The Loanwords of Mongour and the Development of the Archaic Tibetan Dialects" ("Indo-Iranian Monographs" 7), The Hague: Mouton, 1966. In "Language" 44.1: 147-168.

* 1971. "Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages." Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226527190.

* 1976. "Studies in the Grammatical Tradition in Tibet." Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

* 1980. "Origins of the Japanese Language: Lectures in Japan during the Academic Year 1977-78." Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0295957662.

* 1986. "Nihongo: In Defence of Japanese." London: Athlone Press. ISBN 0485112515.

* 1993. "Prolegomena to the First Two Tibetan Grammatical Treatises." ("Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde" 30.) Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien.

* 1994. "A new grammar of written Tibetan." Review of Stephen Beyer, "The Classical Tibetan Language", Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. In "Journal of the American Oriental Society" 114.1: 67-76.

* 1996. "Languages and History: Japanese, Korean and Altaic." Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. ISBN 9748299694.

* 2002. "The Middle Mongolian vocalic hiatus." In "Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae" 55.1-3: 179-205.

References

Menges, Karl H. and Nelly Naumann (editors). 1999. "Language and Literature: Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages." Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.