ABSTRACT
At the earliest reconstructable stage of the development of the Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family, possibly as much as eight thousand years ago (Thurgood 1994), the proto-language was monosyllabic. Matisoff (1991a: 490) reconstructs the syllable canon as *(P) (P) Ci (G) V (:) (Cf) (s).1 It is not clear whether the prefixes in some or all cases entailed a vocalic element. If so, the structure might have been sesquisyllabic (e.g. as in the name tfrùng ‘T’rung/Dulong’, the vocalic element of the tf-prefix is very slight).
