Benedict's method, which he dubbed "teleo-reconstruction", was to compare widely separated languages, with a particular emphasis on Classical Tibetan, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo, and Mizo.
[3] The reconstruction also features "allofams", variant forms of a root postulated to explain inconsistent reflexes in daughter languages.
[5] Contrary to other hypotheses suggesting a Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Yellow River valley of northern China,[6] Matisoff (1991,[7] 2015) suggests that the Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland was located "somewhere on the Himalayan plateau," and gives Proto-Tibeto-Burman a date of approximately 4000 B.C., which is roughly on a par with the age of Proto-Indo-European.
However, due to syntactic convergence within the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, three Tibeto-Burman branches, Karenic, Mruic, and Bai, display SVO (verb-medial) word order.
This syntactic realignment has also occurred in Sinitic, which Scott DeLancey (2011) argues to be a result of creolization through intensive language contact and multilingualism during the Zhou dynasty.
[10] According to many authors such as James Bauman, George van Driem and Scott DeLancey, a system of verbal agreement should be reconstructed for proto-Tibeto-Burman.
This is a topic of scholarly debate, however, and the existence of a PTB verbal agreement system is disputed by such authors as Randy LaPolla.
Matisoff's Proto-Tibeto-Burman reconstruction is by far the most cited, and with his last version published in the final release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (2015).
Matisoff (2009)[14] lists 47 stable Tibeto-Burman roots (i.e., etyma that have cognates widely distributed in branches throughout the family) and their Proto-Tibeto-Burman reconstructions.