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 … - James Alan Matisoff

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

...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.

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?