SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 16 (2013) The merger of Proto-Burmish *ts and *č in Burmese Nathan W. Hill 1 Key Words: Burmese, Burmish, Tibeto-Burman, historical phonology, 1. Introduction Because early attestations of a language are by definition more archaic than later forms of the same language, it behooves a historical linguist to take advantage of the earliest attestations of any particular language; Vedic Sanskrit is a better reflection of Proto- Indo-European than Nepali. 2 Similarly, when one examines the evidence of several languages within a putative family, keeping in mind the obvious fact that all languages change in time one way or another, earlier attested languages are often more archaic than more recently attested languages; Vedic Sanskrit is a better reflection of Proto- Indo-European than Albanian. Thus, as a general principle the earliest attested languages in a family should be the historical linguist's first port of call. Nonetheless, the generally archaic character of early languages in no way implies that 1 Abbreviations: Written Burmese (WBur.), Spoken Burmese (SBur.), Chinese (Chi.), Tibetan (Tib.). In order to force a consistency of notation on citations of the Burmish languages from various sources a raised glottal stop (ˀ) is used for glottalized initials or tense vowels and 'č is used in place of 'c' or 'tʃ' in citations of languages other than OBur. and WBur. Burmese 'c' was probably articulated as [ts]. I would like to thank the British Academy for support in the course of the research that led to this paper. 2 Although this principle may appear too obvious to merit mention, Matisoff (2003) fails to adhere to it, inexplicably preferring Written Tibetan to Old Tibetan and, except in rare cases, Written Burmese to Old Burmese. Trans-Himalayan Lolo-Burmese Burmish Loloish Atsi Maru Burmic Lashi Bola Achang Old Burmese Xiandao Arakanese Standard Burmese Intha Tavoyan Yaw Figure 1: The Burmish language family (dotted relationships are unproven)