A brief response to Fellner and Hill’s “Word families, allofams, and the comparative method”

In a recent article, Fellner & Hill (this volume) level a strong critique against what they view as the misguided prevailing methodology of historical-comparative reconstruction in the Sino-Tibetan (aka Trans-Himalayan) language family. The central focus of their criticism is the assembling of “word families” and the reconstruction of ST proto-forms exhibiting variation to account for those word families. In this response, I argue that the methodology is basically sound and is appropriate to the current state of our knowledge. At the same time, I dispute some of the assertions made by Fellner & Hill, which I believe are mischaracterizations of the methods and assumptions underlying the work of Sino-Tibetan scholars.