Review: Tai-Kadai Languages
书评: Tai-Kadai Languages
Baoya Chen 陈保亚, Zihe Li 李子鹤

Abstract 摘要
Tai-Kadai has been studied as a language group since Benedict (1942) proposed the model of “Thai-Kadai-Indonesian language complex.” As Li (1973) holds a different opinion that Thai is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, discussions on the position of Thai/Tai languages have continued, and its significance is profound. On the one hand, many theories such as “word family correspondence” (Yan 1979), “deep correspondence” (Xing 1993, 1995), and “Rank theory” (Chen 1996) have been proposed to make a more precise judgment of linguistic relationships. On the other hand, scholars have made detailed investigations into individual languages in this group, both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives, in order to excavate more linguistic facts and gain a better understanding of these languages. Among these studies Li’s (1977) reconstruction stands out as a splendid achievement. The book Tai-Kadai Languages, summarizing studies from genetic subgrouping to synchronic description, is a representative work in Tai and Kadai linguistics.