Roy Andrew Miller was an American linguist notable for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic group of languages.
Biography
Miller was born in Winona, Minnesota, on September 5, 1924, to Andrew and Jessie Miller. In 1953, he completed a Ph.D. in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University in New York. Long a student of languages, his early work in the 1950s was largely with Chinese and Tibetan. For example, in 1969 he wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the Tibeto-Burman languages of South Asia. He was Professor of Linguistics at the International Christian University in Tokyo from 1955 to 1963. Subsequently he taught at Yale University; between 1964 and 1970, he was chairman of the department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures. From 1970 until 1989 he held a similar post at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then taught in Europe, mainly in Germany and Scandinavia. He wrote extensively on the Japanese language, from A Japanese Reader and The Japanese Language to Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages and Nihongo: In Defense of Japanese. He later broadened his scope by linking Korean both to Japanese and Altaic, most notably in Languages and History: Japanese, Korean, and Altaic. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, Professors Karl Menges and Nelly Naumann prepared a Festschrift highlighting his career and including articles on Altaic languages.
Selected works
Books
1967a. The Japanese Language. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.
1955a. "Studies in spoken Tibetan I: Phonemics". Journal of the American Oriental Society 75: 46–51.
1955c. "Notes on the Lhasa dialect of the early ninth century". Oriens 8: 284–291.
1955d. "The significance for comparative grammar of some ablauts in the Tibetan number-system". T'oung-pao 43: 287–296.
1955e. "The Independent Status of Lhasa dialect within Central Tibetan". Orbis 4.1: 49–55.
1956. "Segmental diachronic phonology of a Ladakh dialect". Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morganländischen Gesellschaft 106: 345–362.
1956. "The Tibeto-Burman ablaut system". Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan / Kokusai Tōhō Gakusha Kaigi kiyō 1: 29–56.
1957. "The phonology of the Old Burmesevowel system as seen in the Myazedi inscription". Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan / Kokusai Tōhō Gakusha Kaigi kiyō 2: 39–43.
1962. "The Si-tu Mahapandita on Tibetan phonology". 湯浅八郎博士古稀記念論文集 / Yuasa Hachirō hakushi koki kinen ronbunshu / To Dr. Hachiro Yuasa; A Collection of Papers Commemorating His Seventieth Anniversary, 921–933. Tokyo: 国際基督教大学 / Kokusai Kirisutokyō Daigaku.
1966. "Early evidence for vowel harmony in Tibetan". Language 42: 252–277.
1967b.
1967c. "Some problems in Tibetan transcription of Chinese from Tun-huang". Monumenta Serica 27: 123–148.
1978, "Is Tibetan genetically related to Japanese?", in: Proceedings of the Csoma de Körös memorial Symposium, ed. L. Ligeti, Budapest 1978, pp. 295–312.)
2002. "The Middle Mongolian vocalic hiatus". Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 55.1–3: 179–205.
2008 "The Altaic Aorist in *-Ra in Old Korean". Lubotsky, Alexander, ed. Evidence and counter-evidence : essays in honour of Frederik Kortlandt Amsterdam: Rodopi. 267–282.
Reviews
1955b. Review of 稻葉正就 Inaba Shōju, チベット語古典文法学 / Chibettogo koten bunpōgaku Kyoto: 法藏館 Hōzōkan, 1954. Language 31: 481–482.
1968. Review of András Róna-Tas, Tibeto-Mongolica: The Loanwords of Mongour and the Development of the Archaic Tibetan Dialects, The Hague: Mouton, 1966. In Language 44.1: 147–168.
1970. Review of R. Burling’s Proto-Lolo-Burmese. Indo-Iranian Journal 12, 146–159.
1974. "Sino-Tibetan: Inspection of a Conspectus". Journal of the American Oriental Society 94.2: 195–209.
1982. "Linguistic issues in the study of Tibetan Grammar". Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens und Archiv für indische Philosophie 26: 86–116.
