STEDT is a long-term linguistics research project at the University of California at Berkeley. It is directed by Professor James A. MATISOFF of Berkeley's Linguistics Department. Our goal is the publication of an etymological dictionary of Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST), the ancestor language of the large Sino-Tibetan language family. This family includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and over 200 other languages spoken in South and Southeast Asia. The project was founded in 1987 and has enjoyed the support of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The first major dissemination of STEDT research came in the form of A Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction, an introduction to the reconstructed phonology and lexicon of Proto-Tibeto-Burman and the philosophical underpinnings on which the STEDT project rests. This volume (HPTB) included over 1500 reconstructed Proto-Tibeto-Burman roots. In the next phase of the project, additional STEDT etymologies and data will be published systematically, by semantic field, in electronic form.

Current STEDTniks