The book under review summarises and develops many decades of painstaking research in the early history of the pronunciation of the Chinese language. It is the result of the collaboration between two influential linguists. An examination of the methodology deployed in this book and the philological evidence it is based on reveals very serious shortcomings of many kinds that invite further discussion. For example, the very nature of Bernhard Karlgren's contribution to the field is misconstrued as being concerned with phonology, when in fact Karlgren was a vociferous opponent of phonology throughout his long life; there is a complete failure to problematise and properly consider the very concept of “Old Chinese”: the literature on Dialectology of Old Chinese is never considered; the analysis of derivation by tone change is quite inadequate; the discussion of first Old Chinese first person pronouns is basically ill-informed. Most importantly, the methodology is unacceptably conjectural throughout.

中文翻译：

---

无可辩驳的猜想。William H. Baxter 和 Laurent Sagart 的评论，古汉语。新的重建

这本书总结和发展了早期汉语发音史中数十年的潜心研究。它是两位有影响力的语言学家合作的结果。对本书所采用的方法论及其所依据的文献学证据的检查揭示了许多类型的非常严重的缺陷，需要进一步讨论。例如，伯恩哈德·卡尔格伦对该领域的贡献的本质被误解为与音韵学有关，而事实上，卡尔格伦在他漫长的一生中都是音韵学的强烈反对者。完全没有对“古汉语”这个概念进行问题化和正确考虑：从来没有考虑过古汉语方言学的文献；对变调派生的分析很不充分；对第一古汉语第一人称代词的讨论基本上是一知半解。最重要的是，该方法论自始至终都是令人无法接受的推测。