Reply to Matisoff on the Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction

Abstract

its treatment of TB rhymes ―a most welcome advance ‖ and ―a noteworthy achievement‖. In his response [Diachronica 24.2:435–444] to that review, James Matisoff (henceforth M) takes exception to the following, more critical points: the lack of explicitness in the reconstruction of TB consonantal onsets, his approach to subgrouping, and his use of Karlgren’s outdated Chinese reconstruction. He also points to my past lack in judgment concerning the nature of the Chinese/TB relationship. Hypotheses are made to be tested, and to be abandoned in favor of better ones when they fail. Around 1990, I shared Meillet’s distrust of the value of the lexicon in establishing genetic relationships. ST as argued for in Benedict’s Conspectus relied more on the basic character of proposed cognates than on explicitly formulated sound correspondences or morphological agreements. When I made the unexpected discovery of sound correspondences between Chinese and Austronesian words (including one between AN *-q and OC *-ʔ, the source of the marked member among the two basic Chinese tones), I proposed that Chinese was more closely related to AN than to TB and that the bulk of the proposed TB/OC vocabulary consisted of Chinese loanwords into Proto-TB (not implausible a priori: Chinese has loaned

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