Laurent Sagart (born 1951) is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO – UMR 8563) unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Biography

Born in Paris in 1951, he earned his Ph.D. in 1977 at the University of Paris 7 and his doctorat d'État 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 (Min, Hakka, and Waxiang) as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietic, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Kra-Dai. A reconstruction of 4,000 Chinese characters has been published online. Their 2014 book has been awarded the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America.

Sino-Austronesian

Sagart is known for his proposal of the Sino-Austronesian language family. He considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the Sino-Tibetan languages, and also treats the Tai–Kadai languages as a sister group to the Malayo-Polynesian languages within the Austronesian language family.

Indo-European

Laurent Sagart also contributed to Indo-European studies. He co-authored a proposal that the ability to digest milk played an important role in the Indo-European expansion (Garnier et al. 2017), and took part in a controversy in French academia concerning Indo-European studies (Pellard et al. 2018).

Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family

Along with numerous researchers such as Valentin Thouzeau, Robin J. Ryder, Simon J. Greenhill, Johann-Mattis List, Guillaume Jacques and Yunfan Lai, Sagart conclude in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that the Sino-Tibetan languages originated among millet farmers, located in Northern China, around 7,200 years ago.

Selected works