Laurent Sagart

Who is Laurent Sagart?

Laurent Sagart is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Born in Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Paris 7 and his Doctorat d'Etat in 1990 at University of Aix-Marseille 1. His early work focused on Chinese dialectology. He then turned his attention to Old Chinese, attempting a reconstruction of Old Chinese that separated word roots and affixes. His recent work, in collaboration with William H. Baxter, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds on earlier scholarship and in addition takes into account paleography, phonological distinctions in conservative Chinese dialects as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietnamese, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Tai-Kadai. A reconstruction of 4000 Chinese characters has been published online.