Comparative linguistic analysis reveals distinct singular pronominal proclitics in Proto-Tibeto-Burman, indicating an ancient paradigm predating modern pronoun reductions.
A substantial minority of Tibeto-Burman languages have, in addition to independent pronouns, a set of pronominal proclitics. These function as possessives, as elements in compositional pronominal forms, and sometimes as oblique stems. In some languages these are easily interpreted as phonologically reduced forms of the independent pronouns, but there is ample evidence to allow us to reconstruct singular forms *aŋ ‘1 sg ’ and *na ‘2 sg ’ to the proto-language. Since *aŋ is not easily interpreted as simply an unstressed form of *ŋa, the PTB 1 sg independent pronoun, we interpret this as evidence for the PTB provenance of the proclitic paradigm. Divergent paradigms in the daughter languages reflect re-interpretation of originally non-singular 1st person forms as singulars. Secondary rearrangements and widespread loss of the original proclitic paradigm may have been influenced by the resemblance between *1 sg aŋ and the well-known PTB 3rd person pronominal prefix *ʔa(ŋ).
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Scott DeLancey (2026) studied this question.
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