Nicholas Cleaveland Bodman (July 27, 1913 – June 29, 1997) was an American linguist who made fundamental contributions to the study of historical Chinese phonology and Sino-Tibetan languages.
[1] After leaving the navy, Bodman enrolled at Yale, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., with a study of the phonology of the Shiming.
[2] He worked at the Foreign Service Institute from 1950 until 1962, rising to head to the Department of Far Eastern languages.
[4] This system was later developed as a proposal for Old Chinese itself by Bodman's student William Baxter, and independently by Sergei Starostin and Zhengzhang Shangfang, and is now widely accepted.
[4] He marshaled his ideas on Old Chinese and its relationship with Sino-Tibetan in an influential treatment published in 1980.