Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Cornell University from 1962-1979.
Nicholas C. Bodman received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Yale University. He entered the Navy during World War II, and was transferred to Pearl Harbor in 1942, where he was part of the group that deciphered the Japanese naval code. From 1950 to 1961, he worked as a scientific linguist with the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. He came to Cornell in 1962 as an expert in the historic reconstruction of Chinese and related languages. He won Guggenheim and National Science Foundation fellowships in 1961 and 1962, which took him to India, Nepal, and Burma to study Tibeto-Burman languages. After his retirement from Cornell he visited the People's Republic of China twice at the invitation of the Institute of Linguistics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He lectured at major universities and research institutes and conducted linguistic fieldwork on the Min dialect in both Fujian and Guangdon provinces. He was the author of four books and numerous articles and reviews. Professor Bodman died in 1997.
From the description of Nicholas C. Bodman papers, 1945-ca. 1980. (Cornell University Library). WorldCat record id: 63893772
