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In my review of the Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman [Diachronica 23.1:206–223], I called 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of explicitness in the reconstruction of TB consonantal onsets, his approach to subgrouping, and his use of Karlgren's outdated Chinese reconstruction.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 huge sets of words to other languages in contact with it, like Hmong-Mien and Tai-Kadai). My hypothesis made two testable predictions: first, that secure Chinese loans could be found in all TB languages, regardless of geographical location; and second, that Chinese morphology (then still poorly understood) would be closer to AN morphology than to TB morphology. In the nineties I embarked on two research programs to test them. Regarding the first, I found Chinese loanwords in the TB languages in contact with Chinese like Burmese, Bai, Hani, but not elsewhere. Regarding the second, I worked out an internal reconstruction of OC morphology (Sagart 1999) which turned out to be very close to TB morphology. At the same time, after limiting AN material to Formosan languages, phonological, morphological and lexical evidence started appearing which linked both TB and OC equally tightly to AN. These results falsified my old hypothesis. I accordingly abandoned it, and accepted ST as a taxon. I also accepted that Benedict was right on the value of the basic vocabulary, and proposed that all of ST is coordinate with AN within a macrophylum I call ―Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian‖ …

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