Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study ofhistorical Chinese phonology andSino-Tibetan languages.

Bodman was born in Chicago in 1913.He enteredHarvard in 1935, but left after one year and spent several years doing office work and traveling in Europe.He joined theUnited States Navy in 1941, and was assigned toStation HYPO atPearl Harbor in early 1942 to join the team working to decipherJapanese naval codes.He retired from the navy in 1945 with the rank ofLieutenant commander.^[1]

After leaving the navy, Bodman enrolled atYale, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., with a study of the phonology of theShiming.^[1] While at Yale he was a student ofLi Fang-Kuei, who was a visiting professor there at the time.^[2] He worked at theForeign 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 onHokkien that is still a definitive reference.^[1][3]

In 1962, Bodman joined the faculty ofCornell University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1979.^[1][3]He continued to do fieldwork onTibeto-Burman languages andMin dialects.^[1]In an unpublished paper presented at Princeton in 1971, he proposed a novel six-vowel system for a stage of Chinese prior to theOld Chinese of the earliest records.^[4]This system was later developed as a proposal for Old Chinese itself by Bodman's studentWilliam Baxter, and independently bySergei Starostin andZhengzhang 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]

• ——— (1954).A Linguistic Study of the "Shih Ming": Initials and Consonant Clusters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• ——— (1955).Spoken Amoy Hokkien. Kuala Lumpur: Government of the Federation of Malaya.
  • adapted with dialogues rewritten by Wu Su-chu asSpoken Taiwanese, Spoken Language Services, 1983.ISBN 978-0-87950-460-1.
• ——— (1980). "Proto-Chinese and Sino-Tibetan: data towards establishing the nature of the relationship". In van Coetsem, Frans; Waugh, Linda R. (eds.).Contributions to historical linguistics: issues and materials. Leiden: E. J. Brill. pp. 34–199.ISBN 978-90-04-06130-9.
• ——— (1985). "The Reflexes of Initial Nasals in Proto-Southern Min-Hingua". In Acson, Veneeta; Leed, Richard L. (eds.).For Gordon H. Fairbanks. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications. Vol. 20. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 2–20.ISBN 978-0-8248-0992-8.JSTOR 20006706.

• "Guide to the Nicholas C. Bodman Papers, 1945–ca. 1980". Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

• 1913 births
• 1997 deaths
• Yale College alumni
• American sinologists
• Cornell University faculty
• Writers from Chicago
• Linguists of Sino-Tibetan languages
• Linguists of Chinese
• 20th-century American linguists
• Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni

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