Inaugural Lecture of Professor Nathan Hill

You are very welcome to the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Nathan Hill.

Inaugural Lecture Abstract – ‘Chinese Historical Phonology with Marxist Characteristics’

When did knight come to be pronounced the same as night? This is the kind of problem historical linguists investigate and can often answer using familiar evidence such as alliteration and variant spellings. With Chinese things are trickier, because the writing system is much less transparent. In particular, linguists working on Chinese disagree about how much we can learn from what doesn’t happen in the sources: if a large corpus shows no spelling variation of an expected kind, is that a meaningful constraint on reconstruction, or simply an accident of survival and scribal practice? The lecture uses a concrete problem in Old Chinese reconstruction to bring this methodological question into focus and then steps back to ask what kind of “science” Chinese historical phonology can, and should, be. It sets a “facts first” empiricism against a more prediction-driven, hypothetico-deductive stance, and argues that the dispute about negative evidence is methodological rather than merely philological. I argue that the current impasse should be overcome by applying two aspects of Marxist philosophy of science, (i) a “double movement” between empiricism and deductivism (going back to Aristotle), and (ii) that the right approach to problem will itself account for the approaches it supersedes.

About Professor Nathan Hill

Nathan W. Hill is Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies at Trinity College Dublin, Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences and Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He is a historical linguist specialising in the Sino-Tibetan language family, with a particular focus on Tibetan and on Chinese historical phonology. Before joining Trinity in 2021, he taught at SOAS University of London (2008–2022), including as Reader in Tibetan and Historical Linguistics, and he has held visiting and research appointments in Europe, North America, and East Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (2009). His research combines philology, comparative reconstruction, and (increasingly) digital approaches to historical linguistic evidence, and has been supported by major funders including the AHRC and the ERC.

The School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences (SLSCS)

The School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences (SLSCS) brings together research and teaching across linguistics (including applied and computational linguistics), speech science and phonetics, clinical speech and language studies, deaf studies and Irish Sign Language, English language teaching, Irish language technology, and Asian Studies. The School’s stated aim is to be an internationally recognised reference point for the scientific study of language, communication, speech and swallowing, with a particular focus on communication diversity and inclusion, and on informing social, educational and health policy in these areas.