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 u… - James Alan Matisoff

I remember particularly a moment just before leaving for Japan and Thailand in 1976, when I was gazing forlornly at the 14 boxes of fileslips spread out on the diningroom table, wondering if I should really schlep them all across the Pacific for one "final" checking, or just let it go at that. At this critical juncture, it was lucky that Martine Mazaudon was there to say the few words that I wanted to hear: "Yes, take them – you can't stop now!"

I decided to select the Reproductive System as a pilot project, not merely for its prurient interest, but also because this semantic field tends to be neglected in historical linguistic studies, despite the fact that it is particularly rich in metaphorical associations with other areas of the lexicon.

It is a remarkable fact that a tremendous spate of tonogenetic and registrogenic activity occurred all over the South-East Asian linguistic area in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, triggered by the devoicing of the previously *voiced series of obstruents in many Middle Chinese and Hmong-Mien dialects, in Siamese and other Tai languages, in Karenic, in Burmese and many Loloish languages, and in Vietnamese, Khmer, and other Mon-Khmer languages. It is interesting to note that this period was roughly contemporaneous with the Mongol invasions that convulsed Eurasia in those centuries. Is it going too far to regard these extralinguistic events as a sort of punctuation in the sense of Dixon (1997), a period of upheaval that shook up a previously stable prosodic constellation in South-East Asia? Could the peoples of the region have been so terrified by the Golden Hordes that they hardly dared to vibrate their vocal cords, dooming the voiced obstruents to transphonologize into mere breathy voice or lower tone?