The long drought in Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics is over. The field is opening up now as never before. Where once it was the… - James Alan Matisoff

The computer will be crucial to handle the etymological information explosion of the future, but machines will never be able to do all the work for us. There will still doubtless be room for gut feelings, intuitions, temperamental quirks, and professional rivalries, even in the Computer Age. In making etymological 'judgment calls' there will never be a substitute for hands-on human experience in a given language or language family.

...the more I learn about Lahu the less I think I know. It has seemed that the more fluently I came to speak the language, the more apt people were to correct my mistakes, and the less likely they were to accept unidiomatic utterances from me.

There can be no more solemn duty for the comparative linguist than to reconstruct his language family's word for the Supreme Being.