Harry Leonard Shorto


Harry Leonard Shorto was a British philologist and linguist who specialized on the Mon language and Mon-Khmer studies. He authored both a modern Mon dictionary and a dictionary of Mon epigraphy. He worked for most of his career at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, finally as Professor of Mon-Khmer Studies at the University of London until his retirement in 1984.

Contributions

Shorto is the author of two standard reference works, A Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon and the highly respected author of the standard reference to epigraphic Mon - A Dictionary of the Mon Inscriptions - as well as the classic dictionary.
His magnum opus was the Mon-Khmer comparative dictionary, which was meant to be published in the early 1980s. It was rediscovered by his daughter Anna, and was published only in 2006. It presents 2,246 etymologies with almost 30,000 lexical citations. It is the most extensive analysis of Mon-Khmer to appear since Wilhelm Schmidt laid the foundations of comparative Mon-Khmer with the Grundzüge einer Lautlehre der Mon-Khmer-Sprachen and Die Mon-Khmer-Völker.

Works