The manuscript of this book was originally drafted over a quarter of a century ago. It was a distillation of a far more extensive compilation, ‘Sino-Tibetan Linguistics’, on which Paul Benedict and Robert Shafer had been working for many years and which still exists as an unpublished manuscript, some twelve volumes of it, in the files of the University of California and of the authors.

The fact that the book is published now, as well as the form it takes, is in large measure due to Professor James A. Matisoff of Columbia University. Naturally enough, books which lie unpublished for years gather some dust. They age, even if the facts they contain are relatively unchanging. Other books and articles appear, the documentation comes to seem dated; and the task of bringing the whole up to date becomes an almost superhuman one. Yet Professor Matisoff, discovering that this manuscript existed, perceived that its voluminous data and its almost Copernican vision, viewing the ‘Sino-centric’ linguistic area from a standpoint peripheral to it, had neither been duplicated nor superseded in the years since Dr Benedict completed his work and laid it aside to turn to other things.

The problem was how to produce a book which would preserve the sweep and incorporate the information of the original, but would yet allow acknowledgement of germane work accomplished since it was drafted.