Paul K. Benedict Quote

Welcome to the field of Southeast Asian linguistics! This welcome comes with a warning: Southeast Asia is the Bosnia of historical linguistics, with a lovely landscape strewn with land mines! … 'Look-alikes' (look less and less alike the more we know about them) abound, as in Malay bĕras and Wr. Tibetan 'bras for 'rice', as do also unlikely-appearing cognate sets such as Thai pu 'grandfather' and Japanese o: i 'nephew'.

Benedict, Paul K. 1996. "Interphyla flow in Southeast Asia", in The Fourth International Symposium on Language and Linguistics, Thailand, pp. 1579-1590. Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University.