Nathan W. Hill, An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol.21, No.4, 2011.

Scholars of Indo-European historical linguistics have long found it convenient to refer to well known sound changes by the name of the researcher who first noticed the correspondences the sound change accounts for. Because of the proven utility of such named sound laws in Indo-European linguistics, the explicit listing and naming of sound laws in the Tibeto-Burman family could be expected to bring similar benefits.

Here I present those sound changes which are widely accepted to have occurred between the Tibeto-Burman Ursprache and Old Tibetan. I name each law after the first research known to me to have described it. The first four proposals, those of Shafer, von Koerber Walleser, and de Jong, concentrate mor-e on the interpretation of the Tibetan script than actual sound changes from pre-Tibetan to Tibetan, and thus are labelled 'rules' rather than 'laws'. The sou-nd laws have been ordered such that later laws can employ the results of earlier ones as evidence.