He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technology, plants and languages. After he obtained his baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture , in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in the administration. However, at graduation, Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group. Unlike his peers, he was interested not in promoting modern tools and technology but in understanding traditional technology, societies and languages. He attended lectures in geography, phonetics, ethnology and genetics in Paris. Marcel Mauss obtained funding for him to go toLeningrad for one year to pursue studies in genetics with Nikolai Vavilov, whose lectures he had attended with great interest at the National Institute of Agriculture. In 1940, Haudricourt was awarded a position in the new Centre national de la recherche scientifique, in its botany department, but he was disappointed by the research being done there, which relied on static classifications instead of an evolutionary approach espousing the new developments of genetics. In August 1940, the linguist Marcel Cohen entrusted to Haudricourt his library of books about linguistics before he joined the Résistance, as he was afraid that the German occupation army would confiscate his library. That allowed Haudricourt to make extensive readings in linguistics during the Second World War. Meanwhile, he also studied Asian languages at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes. Haudricourt decided to switch from the botany department of CNRS to its linguistics department in 1945. In 1947, he presented a PhD dissertation about Romance languages. The nonconformist thesis was not accepted by the two reviewers and so Haudricourt was not allowed to teach at the École pratique des hautes études. Instead, Haudricourt volunteered to work at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi from 1948 to 1949. There, he was able to clarify issues in the historical phonology of Asian languages and to develop general models of language change. Within the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Haudricourt cofounded in 1976 a research centre whose goal is to investigate little-documented languages within their cultural environment, combining ethnological and linguistic work: the LACITO research centre.
Work
Methodological contributions
Haudricourt is considered to be the founder of the panchronic program in historical phonology.
Tonogenesis
His study of the history of Chinese, Vietnamese and other East Asian languages draws on seminal insights. He clarified how a toneless language can become tonal. De l'origine des tons en vietnamien explains tonogenesis in Vietnamese and numerous other East and Southeast Asian languages and paved the way for the reconstruction of nontonal ancestors for the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, such as Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Tai. A more comprehensive account of the development and evolution of tonal systems was published by Haudricourt in 1961.
Haudricourt's main legacies to the field of reconstruction of Old Chinese historical phonology, apart from his systematic account of tonogenesis, are his reconstruction of final *-' as well as labiovelars. Haudricourt clarified several rhyming patterns found in the Book of Odes. Words with final stops /-p -t -k/ rhyme with words in departing tone according to their Middle Chinese pronunciation. For instance, words in the zhà 乍 and zuó 昨 series rhyme, as do words in the bì 敝 and piē 瞥 series. That led Karlgren to reconstruct a voiced series of finals: /*-d/, /*-g/ and /*-b/. Haudricourt's theory, which states that the departing tone comes from *-s, explains that phenomenon. The words with departing tone rhyming with words in final stop should be reconstructed with final clusters *-ks, *-ts or *-ps. Moreover, from the point of view of historical morphology, Haudricourt's theory of tonogenesis leads to the reconstruction of several *-s suffixes which can be shown to be cognate with those found in conservative Sino-Tibetan languages such as Tibetan. A second major finding is his hypothesis that labiovelars existed in Old Chinese: "...it seems that scholars have overlooked the fact that some rhymes in the Analytic Dictionary only appear with velar initials, for instance -iʷei 齊, -ʷâng 唐, -iʷäng 清, -ʷâk 鐸, -iʷet 屑etc.". The idea was used later to revise the reconstruction of the Old Chinesevowel system and is the basis for the six-vowel system common to recent systems.
