[4] The Bailang people are described as living to the west of Wenshan, a mountain of the Minshan range in the southern part of modern Mao County.
Thus in addition to the distortion inherent in transcription, interpretation is complicated by the transmission history of the text and uncertainty about the pronunciation of Eastern Han Chinese.
[7] This view is disputed by Christopher Beckwith, who claims that the Bailang version shows patterns of assonance and consonance when the characters are read in a southwestern variety of Eastern Han Chinese.
[10] However, Coblin argues that some Bailang words appear to be more conservative than reconstructed Proto-Lolo–Burmese, and that it is therefore likely that it was a close relative rather than an actual member of the family.
For example, the word for "gorge" is transcribed with the character 龍, whose Old Chinese form is reconstructed by Li Fang-Kuei as *gljung.