ABSTRACT
At the earliest reconstructable stage of the development of the Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family, possibly as much as 6,000 years ago (Thurgood 1994), 1 the protolanguage was monosyllabic. Matisoff (2014) reconstructs the syllable canon as *(P 2 ) (P 1 ) Ci (G 1 ) (G 2 ) V (ː) (w/y) (Cf) (s). 2 It is not clear whether the prefi xes in some or all cases entailed a vocalic element. If so, the structure might have been sesquisyllabic (e.g. as in the name t ə̌ rùng ‘T’rung/Dulong’, the vocalic element of the t ə̌-prefi x is very slight).
