Sino-Tibetan Research Articles

Why do Numerais Show 'Irregular' Correspondence Patterns in Tibeto-Burman? Some Southeastern Tibeto-Burman Examples

Within Sino-Tibetan (ST) and Tibeto-Burman (TB), numerals show various irregular correspondence patterns, both at the macro level within ST, at the middle level within TB, and within various subgroups of TB. In various Southeastern TB languages, there are apparentiy irregular tonal and/or initial reflexes which are seen in some numerals. Some of these result from sandhi in combination with a numeral and a following classifier. In a few languages, conversely, the form of the classifier is affected by the preceding numeral. There are also specific forms for some numerals which are used in counting.

Expressives in Kam (Dong 侗): A study in sign typology (part 11)

Like many Austro-Tai languages and many Sino-Tibetan languages, Kam (Dong 侗) exhibits a wealth of descriptive syllables after the verb or the adjective. These syllables, henceforth called expressives, are typically reduplicated and cover a wide range of functions such as grading, speed and manner modification, and various kinds of sound symbolism, metaphor, etc. I propose to view the expressive compound as a sign: the predicate-head functions as the signified and the expressive as the signifier. In fact, since the predicate-head itself has the classical Saussurean sign anatomy, the head-expressive compound presents the case of a complex sign or what I call a second-order sign. The attested types of relationship that hold between the signified and signifier spread across almost the whole spectrum of sign species recognized in the literature. This paper is the result of a survey of ca 260 expressives and is one of the achievements of a long-term Kam dictionary project.

Final Consonants and Glottalization: New Perspectives from Hanoi Vietnamese

The evolution from final obstruents to final glottal stop and then to rhymeglottalization (i.e. from /at/ to /aʔ/, then to /aˀ/) is a well-established general trendin the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family and beyond. It has further beenshown by laryngoscopy that in three languages which retain the nonreleasedsyllable-final obstruents /p/, /t/ and /k/ (Standard Thai, and two Chinese dialects),these obstruents are often accompanied by a glottal stop. The present researchraises the issue whether there is another typological possibility: can nonreleasedfinal obstruents be accompanied consistently by modal phonation, without glottalstop? Analysis of electroglottographic recordings of 126 syllables in two carriersentences spoken by 4 speakers shows that, in Hanoi Vietnamese, the final obstruents/p/, /t/ and /k/ are not accompanied by glottalization, and that the open quotientincreases in the course of the syllable rhyme. Obstruent-final rhymes (whichmay carry either of two tones: D1 or D2) are compared with nasal-final rhymeswhich, under one of the tones (tone B2), are confirmed to be glottalized. Our findingis that tones D1 and D2 (i.e. obstruent-final rhymes) are both produced inmodal voice, which shows that the typological paradigm of observed realizationsof syllable-final obstruents must be enlarged. The discussion puts forward thehypothesis that the unusual association of segments and voice quality found inHanoi Vietnamese is a strategy to maintain the opposition between B2-tone andD2-tone rhymes.

On the genetic position of the Bai language

Different proposals on the genetic relationship of the Bai language in the past century are reviewed in this article, as well as the methodologies of genetic classification. In light of some new data on the Bai dialects and new hypotheses on the genetic classification of Sino-Tibetan languages, this article calls attention to the necessity for the reconstruction of Proto-Bai and shows that some proposals are invalid from a taxonomic viewpoint.

The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Edited by Thurgood Graham and Randy J. LaPolla. Routledge Language Family Series, no. 3. London: Routledge, 2003. xxii, 727 pp. $295.00 (cloth).

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Expressives in Kam (Dong 侗): A study in sign typology (Part I)

Like many Austro-Tai languages and many Sino-Tibetan languages, Kam (Dong 侗) exhibits a wealth of descriptive syllables after the verb or the adjective. These syllables, henceforth called expressives, are typically reduplicated and cover a wide range of functions such as grading, speed and manner modification, and various kinds of sound symbolism, metaphor, etc. I propose to view the expressive compound as a sign: the predicate-head functions as the signified and the expressive as the signifier. In fact, since the predicate-head itself has the classical Saussurean sign anatomy, the headexpressive compound presents the case of a complex sign or what I call a second-order sign. The attested types of relationship that hold between the signified and signifier spread across almost the whole spectrum of sign species recognized in the literature. This paper is the result of a survey of ca. 260 expressives and is one product of a long-term Kam dictionary project.

Thinking as saying: s huo (‘say’) in Taiwan Mandarin conversation and BBS talk

The research reported here is an attempt to explore the functions of shuo ‘say’ in informal Chinese speech and writing. We further probe into the grammaticalization of shuo, discussing how the various lexical, grammatical and discourse functions have come into being, with reference to the general tendencies of semantic change proposed by Traugott [(1982). In: Lehmann and Malkiel (Eds.) Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Benjamins, Amsterdam. pp. 245–272; (1989) Language 65(1), 31–55] and Traugott and König [In: Traugott and Heine (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I. John Benjamins, Philadelphia. pp. 189–218], and the metaphor MIND-AS-BODY proposed by Sweetser [(1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. The corpus used in this study contains two sets of data: non-face-to-face talk on BBS (the Electronic Bulletin Board System) and face-to-face daily conversation, mainly produced by young people in Taiwan. Our data indicate that shuo, in addition to acting as a complementizer as discussed by S. Huang [On the (almost perfect) identify of speech and thought: Evidence from Chinese dialects. (1982). Paper presented at Fourteenth International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics] and Cheng [(1997). In: Cheng (Ed.), Taiwanese and Mandarin Structures and Their Developmental Trends in Taiwan II: Contacts between Taiwanese and Mandarin and Restructuring of their Synonyms. Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Taipei. pp. 105–131], can also occur in an utterance-initial position, functioning as a marker of hearsay, and in an utterance-final position, as a marker of counterexpectation or as an intensifier. On the whole, the data suggest that the initial and final shuo's are innovations serving an expressive function. In particular, the lexeme shuo is moving from the propositional level to the expressive level; i.e., it is evolving from a verb meaning ‘say’ that prefaces an utterance conveying information into a discourse marker that encodes the attitude of the speaker toward the proposition.

Variation and merger of the rising tones in Hong Kong Cantonese

Two male speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese varied the endpoints of High Rising and Mid-Low Rising tones and merged them in both directions under experimental conditions. The variation and merger of the two rising tones raise the possibility that at least four tonal subsystems may coexist within the Hong Kong Cantonese speech community. Sociolinguistic research over the past 20 years has documented variation and change among Cantonese sound segments but not the tones. Tonal variation in Hong Kong Cantonese appears to be a potentially important sociolinguistic variable.This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 33rd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics in Trang, Thailand, on October 5, 2000. The research reported here was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. PolyU 5249/99H Linguistics) and by Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Grant G-YB57.

Y-Chromosomal DNA Variation in Pakistan

Eighteen binary polymorphisms and 16 multiallelic, short-tandem-repeat (STR) loci from the nonrecombining portion of the human Y chromosome were typed in 718 male subjects belonging to 12 ethnic groups of Pakistan. These identified 11 stable haplogroups and 503 combination binary marker/STR haplotypes. Haplogroup frequencies were generally similar to those in neighboring geographical areas, and the Pakistani populations speaking a language isolate (the Burushos), a Dravidian language (the Brahui), or a Sino-Tibetan language (the Balti) resembled the Indo-European-speaking majority. Nevertheless, median-joining networks of haplotypes revealed considerable substructuring of Y variation within Pakistan, with many populations showing distinct clusters of haplotypes. These patterns can be accounted for by a common pool of Y lineages, with substantial isolation between populations and drift in the smaller ones. Few comparative genetic or historical data are available for most populations, but the results can be compared with oral traditions about origins. The Y data support the well-established origin of the Parsis in Iran, the suggested descent of the Hazaras from Genghis Khan's army, and the origin of the Negroid Makrani in Africa, but do not support traditions of Tibetan, Syrian, Greek, or Jewish origins for other populations.

In Memoriam, Stanley Starosta 1939-2002

In Memoriam, Stanley Starosta 1939-2002 Byron W. Bender Stanley Starosta died on July 18, 2002, at age 62, of congestive heart failure. Thus ended prematurely a unique scholarly career,1 summarized as follows by his colleague, William O'Grady: "From an early point in his career, Stan chose to take on the linguistic establishment. While others believed that a sentence's organization came from syntactic rules, Stan believed it came from the properties of its component words—a view that eventually became part of the mainstream, incidentally. While others held that there were multiple levels of syntactic representation—a deep structure, a surface structure, a logical form, and so on, Stan insisted that there was just one level of structure. And that level of structure was not anything like what mainstream syntactic representations looked like. There were no V-bars—or even VPs, and no c-command or government either. It all came down to five simple case relations, as Stan saw it. For the most part these were not popular ideas and syntacticians being the type of people that they are, Stan had to endure considerable criticism and even scorn during his career. But that did not stop him. He attended and spoke at literally dozens of conferences around the world, always fearlessly putting forward his theory, challenging others to tell him why it wasn't right and why it wasn't better than what they were doing. And he didn't just analyze easy things—he took on the toughest phenomena that language has to offer: case, agreement, ergativity, long-distance dependencies, historical reconstruction, genetic relationships, European languages, Munda languages, Formosan languages, Philippine languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Thai, Japanese, Korean, and so on. And he went up against the top scholars in the various fields in which he worked, time and time again, never hesitating and never retreating. "Stan was an extremely decent person. From our first conversation, which took place on the first Friday of the 1985 fall semester at Mama Mia's (now Magoo's), it was clear that he and I were going to disagree on virtually everything. (That first conversation was about whether VPs exist, by the way.) For seventeen years, we debated and disagreed on just about every issue in syntactic analysis that ever came up. But there was never any nastiness in the debates, many of which took place publicly in front of students, during the three syntax seminars that we joyfully cotaught. In fact, Stan was fond of saying to the students that he wanted them to see that it was possible to disagree without being disagreeable. True, we pushed each other hard and we were harsh with each other's ideas, which we both felt was valuable and necessary, but that never prevented us from enjoying our weekly beer and peanuts together at Mama Mia's on Friday afternoons. [End Page 255] "Stan was extraordinarily generous with students, especially those who chose to walk the less traveled path with him and explore the world of language through his beloved theory of Lexicase. Even in the 1980s, when I first met him, Stan was already legendary for the time and effort that he gave to students who shared his interest in languages and language, and were willing to work very, very hard. Many of those students have gone on to have successful careers of their own, and are able to transmit Stan's legacy to their students: work hard, be fair, check the facts, don't be swayed by the latest idea just because it's fashionable, and so on." The Early Years.2 Stanley Starosta was born in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, November 28, 1939, the eldest of three sons. Oconomowoc is a town of just under 10,000 in the lake country of south central Wisconsin; the original family home was on Lower Nemahbin Lake. Stan's father worked as a pole crew foreman for Wisconsin Electric Power for almost 30 years before retiring. Stan's brother Noel, a year younger, is a machinist in Milwaukee. Stan's brother Bill (seven years his junior, currently Professor of Communication and Culture at Howard U.), reports that "it may be of interest...

The Roots of Old Chinese (review)

Reviewed by: The roots of Old Chinese by Laurent Sagart Gonzalo Rubio The roots of Old Chinese. By Laurent Sagart. (Current issues in linguistic theory 184.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xi, 255. One of the most important consequences of the last 80 years of research in Old Chinese (OC) concerns the discovery of the morphology of what was regarded as the isolating language par excellence. Reconstructing final consonantal clusters in codas (which carried the rhymes in the major corpus of OC, the poems of the Shījīng) and initial clusters shed light not only on the complex phonotactics of OC but also on the elements of derivational morphology which were responsible for the formation of semantically related words as well as personal pronouns. The main steps in this unveiling process were marked by the works of Bernhard Karlgren (with their culmination in Grammata serica recensa, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1964), Edwin G. Pulleyblank (Middle Chinese, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1984), and William H. Baxter (A handbook of Old Chinese phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992). Whereas all these efforts were focused on phonology and, therefore, any morphological findings were a rather accidental byproduct, Sagart vindicates the figure of Henri Maspero, whose work on OC morphology would have probably reached groundbreaking conclusions if he had not died a victim of the Nazi horror in Buchenwald in March 1945. In his 1934 article (Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 5.1–112), Karlgren dealt with several morphological alternations within word families, but he did not suggest that affixes were responsible for such alternations. However, in a 1930 article (Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique 23.313–27), Maspero pointed to the existence and productivity of affixes in OC. Ten years earlier, he had also pioneered the research concerning initial consonantal clusters in OC (Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 20.1–124). S summarizes these and other contributions by Maspero (2–4), placing them in the context of the later developments in the reconstruction of OC and the progressive introduction of the concept of affixation as an explanation for what appear as derivational elements employed in both general Wortbildung and in the pronominal system. One of S’s most valuable assets lies in the use of comparative material from other Sino-Tibetan languages which provide further support for some of the proposals made in this book. After a very informative introduction (1–12), the first half of this book deals with the phonological and morphological aspects of the so-called ‘word families’. S first explains the nature of OC words and roots (13–23) together with their root segmentals and the syllabic structure of OC (24–62). Diverse chapters devoted to several prefixes follow: *s- (63–73), used to derive causative, denominative, directive, and perhaps inchoative verbs, as well as to derive nouns from verbs; *N- (74–78)—instead of the voiced laryngeal *ɦ- as Pulleyblank and Baxter reconstruct—a nasal prefix which assimilates its articulation point to the following consonant and which generates intransitive verbs out of transitive ones; *m- (79–86), which probably marks the controlled or volitional nature of the action indicated with a verb; *p- (87–89), whose function remains obscure; *t- (90–97), deriving mostly intransitive and stative verbs from other verbs, as well as generally uncountable nouns; *k- (98–107), which seems to mark an iterative Aktionsart in many instances; *q- (108–9); and voiced stop prefixes (110). The reconstruction of infixes in OC is especially interesting for the alleged implications of traditional language types. OC exhibited at least one infix (111–20), *-r-, marking mostly repetitive action in verbs, dual or plural in nouns, and intensive in adjectives. This infix survives in the -l- of some modern Chinese dialects (e.g. Western Mı̌n Jiànōu kau8-lau8 ‘to stir’ from kau8). The study of prefixes and infixes is followed by chapters on initial clusters (121–30), suffixes (131–36), reduplication and compounding (137–38), and issues of etymology (139–141). The second part of the book is devoted to the study of different semantic fields and grammatical...

Tibetan (review)

Reviewed by: Tibetan by Philip Denwood Gonzalo Rubio Tibetan. By Philip Denwood. (London Oriental and African language library 3.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xix, 372. Although attention is given to other dialects and to Preclassical (PT) and Classical Tibetan (CT), this overview is actually a thorough linguistic description of the modern dialect spoken in the Lhasa area. The first chapters deal with the geographic framework (1–11), the history (13–19), and the dialects (21–45) of Tibetan and its speakers. A discussion of the levels of analysis—graphematic, phonological, and lexicogrammatical—(47–53) is followed by a presentation of the script and some morphophonological matters linked to the writing interface (55–68). The next eight chapters (69–242) are devoted to the Lhasa [End Page 868] dialect, covering phonology, morphology, and syntax in detail. A short sketch of PT and CT (243–73) provides the reader with a mesmerizing window into the grammar of this culturally and historically important language. The final chapter (275–87) presents a few parsed textual samples of Lhasa, PT, and CT. The appendixes include a list of dialects (289–95) and a brief description of the phonology of other Tibetan dialects (297–306). The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography (307–56) and indexes (357–72). It is rather surprising that Denwood appears reluctant to accept that all Tibetan dialects are historically part of the same Tibetan language sensu stricto (43–44). It is true that one should reject any reductionist approach to the linguistic history of Tibetan— i.e. attempts at making PT or CT the direct ancestor of any of the modern spoken or written variants. There were certainly other vernacular variants which were never written and may well account for the ancestry of most contemporary dialects. It is also clear that the traditional tree model, with its monolithic Ursprache, works as a Procrustean bed on which a wide and complex range of evidence can hardly fit. However, one cannot deny that, regardless of the specifics of their internal relationship, the different ancient and modern Tibetan dialects belong to a branch of the Tibeto-Burman group within the larger Sino-Tibetan family. It is simply quite farfetched to propose, as D does, that the conspicuous and consistent correspondences between the different dialectal variants are either the result of a creole-like model of interaction or due to external influence. Probably the guidelines for the series and the overwhelming focus on the modern dialect of Lhasa have prevented D from exploring some potentially fecund avenues, especially concerning historical developments. For instance, when discussing the issue of the ’a-chung or ‘small a’ (57), usually transliterated as an apostrophe, there is no mention of the possible prenasal feature represented by this grapheme as a prefix in CT, as is probably reflected in some modern Tibetan dialects with prenasalized clusters; see Stephan V. Beyer (The Classical Tibetan language, 47. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). Such a consideration would carry considerable weight in the ongoing discussion on the reconstruction of the intransitivizing prefix in Old Chinese (either a voiced laryngeal *ɦ- or a nasal segment *N- whose articulation point is determined by the following segment); see Laurent Sagart (The roots of Old Chinese, 74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999). In spite of these few observations, this book offers an excellent overview of Lhasa Tibetan as well as some insights on PT and CT. This focus on a modern dialect makes the book especially valuable for linguists, but it may discourage some general readers whose interest lies in the Classical language. Gonzalo Rubio Ohio State University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

GIS Mapping and Analysis of Tai Linguistic and Settlement Patterns in Southern China

By integrating linguistic information and physical geographic features in a GIS environment, this paper maps the spatial variation of terms connected with wet-rice farming of Tai minority groups in southern China and shows that the primary candidate of origin for proto-Tai is in the region of Guangxi-Guizhou, not Yunnan or the middle Yangtze River region as others have proposed. In addition, Tai speaking people (Zhuang and Bouyei) settle at low elevations along rivers where they can practice irrigated rice farming, in contrast to the Yi, members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, who are found at higher elevations. The patterns of different ethnolinguistic groups exploiting different ecological niches are likely true for all of Asia. GIS technology has great potential to help explain such patterns and understand population movements and distributions.

Bilingual Education Among Minority Nationalities in China: a Study of the Naxi Pilot Project At Yilong, Yunnan

This article reports on the test results of a pilot project (PP), undertaken in 1986 at the Yilong school of northwestern Yunnan. The project involved teaching Naxi (a Sino-Tibetan language) and Chinese literacy to monolingual Naxi children. It aimed at facilitating the integration of these children into the regular curriculum. The objective of this paper is to compare the biliteracy and the regular Chinese literacy programs to determine if biliteracy had a positive effect on these minority language students. In 1992, we tested 60 students in oral Naxi/Chinese (production) and written Chinese (production and overall quality). The experimental group comprised 30 students of the PP (grades 5 and 6) and the control group, 30 of the regular parallel classes (R). Test score results in oral Naxi productivity were highly significant, suggesting that PP students were more verbal in L 1 than their R peers and reflecting higher self-esteem. However, there were no clear cross-language correlations for the oral skills. In spite of fewer periods of formal literacy instruction, the PP students' written holistic and structural scores in Chinese matched those of the regular classes. The biliteracy program, as a direct result of the PP's academic success, is currently (in 1996) an integrated part of Yilong's primary school curriculum. Since the early eighties, the Central Government of China has sponsored various bilingual programs among its 55 minority ethnic groups or nationalities (as referred to by Chinese scholars)' in order to facilitate the integration of students into the regular (Chinese) curriculum. For example, the multi-ethnic Province of Yunnan has 24 minority nationalities which constitute one third of the provincial population (or 10 million people). Therefore, this province was fertile ground for the government to implement a variety of bilingual programs at the elementary level.

Edward Sapir and the "Sino-Dene" Hypothesis.

The American scholar Edward Sapir proposed that the Na-Dene languages of North America (Haida, Tlingit, Eyak, Athabaskan) are genetically related to the Sino-Tibetan languages of Asia (Sinitic, Karenic, Tibeto-Burman). Sapir and other linguists have found correspondences between the phonetic systems, and more importantly, the grammar and basic vocabulary of both families. It is maintained here that Spair was essentially correct about this genetic connection (“Sino-Dene”), and that there is no evidence that he ever retracted it. Recent research corroborates Sapir's hypothesis and indicates the high probability of a widespread Dene-Caucasian family, which dispersed some 11, 000 years ago. Some new linguistic evidence for this family is also presented here for the first time.

On the dating and nature of verb agreement in Tibeto-Burman

This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Women and Religion: "Mennonite Hmong"

The Hmong of Laos, a traditionally animist and preliterate people, speak a Sino-Tibetan language and are culturally close to the Chinese. Due to their strategic location and scouting and fighting skills, the Hmong were singled out during the war in Indochina to collaborate with the CIA as front line guerrillas. The eventual assumption of power in 1975 in Laos of communist- backed Pathet Lao forces, resulted in increasing hardships and danger for those Hmong who had complied with the U.S. Army Special Forces. By 1980, more than 110,000 Hmong were forced to flee Thailand. Most Hmong from Thai refugee camps resettled in the U.S., France, Australia and Canada. The Mennonite Central Committee's (MCC) policy to aid sponsor cases like the preliterate and non- industrial Hmong resulted in a proportionately high influx of Hmong to Ontario; hence Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W) has been dubbed the "Hmong Capital" of Canada by immigration officials.

The Tibetan verb: tense and nonsense

Written Tibetan (WT) is unusual among Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages in possessing a relatively complex verb morphology which contains—apart from distinctive ‘prefixes' for intransitive/transitive verb pairs, a phenomenon found elsewhere in ST—prefixes and suffixes for certain tenses as well as a morphologically significant ablaut system, none of which can be found, or at least, none of which are common in other ST languages. The simplest ways of dealing with the problem of the origin and development of this system in the light of comparative ST researches are, firstly, ignoring it, and secondly, coming up withad hoctheories about its independent development, thereby not affecting the apparently stable edifice of ST in any way.

Le destin des obstruantes sonores du chinois ancien dans les dialectes Min

The voiced obstruent initials of Aneient Chinese have both (voiceless) aspirated and unaspirated reflexes in Min and other Chinese dialects , without any apparent conditioning factor. It is argued that such double developments do not reflect the existence in Proto-Min of two or three series of voiced obstruents (Norman 1973) - a reconstruction unsupported by other Chinese dialects and Sino-tibetan languages - but are the result of the interference with the devoicing process of a synchronie sandhi rule prohibiting breathy phonation to occur in stressed syllables. Proto-Min was presumably a language with phrase-final stress, like modern Min dialects. It is shown (tables 5 & 6) that words which do not occur phrase- finally , such as transitive verbs and nouns determining other nouns, are likely to have an aspirated initial, while words that occur phrase-finally are likely to have an unaspirated initial in Amoy. Family names, which carry strong stress regardless of their position, generally have unaspirated initials (Table 4). The sandhi rule proposed for Proto-Min is observed in two recently described dialects : Chongming (Zhang 1979) and Longsheng Ling (Wang 1979).

‘Vocalic alternation’ in the Balti, the Lhasa, and the Sherpa verb, as a guide to alternations in Written Tibetan, and to Proto-Tibetan Reconstruction

In Sino-Tibetan (1972) P. K. Benedict has offered two different accounts of the significance, for Tibeto-Burman (TB) and Sino-Tibetan (ST) reconstruction, of the three types of ‘vocalic alternation’ in the Written Tibetan (WT) verb, a/a/o, e/a/o and o/a/o. His original account (c. 1942–3) reads: ‘Tibetan, however, shows a puzzling type of vocalic alternation in its verbs, in which stems in a regularly take o in the imperative and often either o or e in the present… The e of the present stem is possibly to be interpreted as an effect of the prefixed element’- <*a- [ə-]. Similarly, the o of the imperative stem has perhaps been conditioned by an archaic imperative suffixc -o…' (pp. 126–7). His revised version (1972) reads: ‘The Chinese vowels cannot be explained without setting up a 7-vowel system for ST … and Tibetan verb forms reflect this early system as follows:ST/TB *a = T aa (no alternation, except in the imperative)ST/TB *â = T aoST/TB *ə = T aeWe can now, by way of illustration, reconstruct TB *g-sât (T gsod-pa, Pf.bsad) …; also TB*səm “breath, voice, spirit”: T sem(s)-pa. Pf. semsbsams “think” …' (p. 126, n. 344).