Tatsuo Nishida


Tatsuo Nishida was a professor at Kyoto University. His work encompasses research on a variety of Tibeto-Burman languages, he made great contributions in particular to the deciphering of the Tangut language.
Born in Osaka, Nishida graduated from the Kyoto University Faculty of Letters in 1951. In 1958 he became assistant professor at Kyoto University. During his studies Ishihama Juntarō and Izui Hisanosuke had a formative impact on him.
In 1958 he was awarded the Japan Academy Prize. In 1962 he received his PhD for his study of Tangut characters. In 1992 he retired as a professor. In 1994 he received the Asahi Award, and in 2005 the Kyoto Culture Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
He died in Kyoto in September 2012.
Nishida's approach, dubbed "philological linguistics" by Shōgaito Masahiro, involved the linguistic study of textual works and the integration of fieldwork on contemporary languages with philological study. In the context of this overall approach, one of his major theoretical contributions was the notion of "sonus grammae", the phonology that is implied by a script system as analytically as differentiable from the phonology of a language that uses the particular script system at a certain time and place.

Works

Books

1989. On the mTsho-sna Mon-pa language in China. In Prosodic analysis and Asian linguistics, to honor R. K.Sprigg, ed. David Bradley, Eugénie J. A. Henderson, and Martine Mazaudon, 223-36. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University.