George van Driem
George "Sjors" Louis van Driem (born March 19, 1957 in Nassawadox , Virginia ) is a Dutch linguist. He is professor of historical linguistics at the University of Bern .
Life
Van Driem studied biology at the University of Virginia (bachelor's degree 1979) and Slavic and linguistics in Leiden , among other things . He received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1987 with a dissertation on the grammar of Limbu .
Van Driem is particularly concerned with languages of the Himalayan region, is involved in a project on endangered languages of the region (Himalayan Languages Project) and editor of a two-volume handbook on languages of the Himalayan region. He was commissioned by the government of Bhutan to compile a grammar of Dzongkha . Van Driem also dealt with the origin of the Sino-Tibetan languages .
He advocates a symbiotic theory of language (symbiosism), which understands it as a symbiont of the human brain and humans as a being composed of symbiont and host.
In addition to Dutch and English, he speaks Russian, Czech, Nepalese, French, Portuguese, Hindi, German, Afrikaans and Urdu.
Fonts
- Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region: Containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language, 2 volumes, Brill 2001
- Language as organism: A brief introduction to the Leiden theory of language evolution, in: Ying-chin Lin, Fang-min Hsu, Chun-chih Lee, Jackson T.-S. Sun, Hsiu-fang Yang, Dah-ah Ho (Eds.), Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor of Professor Hwang-cherng Gong on his Seventieth Birthday (Language and Linguistics Monograph Series W-4). Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia 2004, pp. 1-9
- The language organism: The Leiden theory of language evolution, in: James W. Minett, William SY. Wang (Ed.), Language Acquisition, Change and Emergence: Essays in Evolutionary Linguistics. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2005, pp. 331-340
- Tibeto-Burman vs. Sino-Tibetan, in: Werner Winter, Brigitte Bauer, Georges-Jean Pinault (eds.), Language in time and space: a Festschrift for Werner Winter on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p. 101– 119
Web links
- Homepage of the Himalaya Language Project (English)
- Rolex Award (English)
- Literature by and about George van Driem in the bibliographic database WorldCat
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Driem, George van |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Driem, George Louis van (full name); Sjors |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch linguist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 19, 1957 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nassawadox , Virginia |