Background
Jerry Norman was born on July 16, 1936, in Watsonville, California.
Jerry Norman was born on July 16, 1936, in Watsonville, California.
After graduating from high school, he began attending the University of California at Berkeley where he studied Chinese under the prominent Chinese linguist and polymath Y. R. Chao. He subsequently went to Taiwan to engage in field research on Taiwanese, and in 1969 he completed his Doctor of Philosophy at Berkeley, with a dissertation on the Jianyang dialect of Fujian.
Norman had a large impact on Chinese linguistics, and was largely responsible for the identification of the importance of the Minister Chinese dialects in linguistic research into Old In 1965 he had worked with Leo Chen on an introduction to the Fuzhou dialect and a Fuzhou-English glossary, and in 1966 Norman joined the Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton University as a staff linguist. In 1972, he joined the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, retiring in 1998. In a series of papers from 1973, Norman applied the comparative method to popular forms in modern Minister dialects to reconstruct proto-Minister
He died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in Seattle on July 7, 2012.
