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

— James Matisoff God and the Sino-Tibetan Copula (1985)

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More quotes by James Matisoff

The long drought in Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics is over. The field is opening up now as never before.

Benedict's Sino-Tibetan: a rejection of Miller's Conspectus inspection (1975)

The South-East Asian mono-syllable often seems to be bulging at the seams with phonetic material: consonantal, vocalic, and supra-segmental.

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.

On Megalocomparison (1990)

I decided to start with the reproductive system, not only because of its prurient interest but also because it seemed like the point of departure for all things.

Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (2003)

Bilingual humor may be viewed as a relatively benign response to the frustrations inherent in living in such a linguistically and racially heterogeneous region as the hills and valleys of backwoods Southeast Asia.

Lahu bilingual humor (1969)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Matisoff (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.