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In a recent post on ‘water’ and ‘lip’ (https://stan.hypotheses.org/20) I identified a correspondence indicating PST *-ur:OC *-ur, Bodo -əy, Lushai -ui, -Proto-Karen *-ej, WT *-u.‘Egg’ would fit into that correspondence beautifully —the coda in the OC word is ambiguous for *-r—if it was not for a rare WT word for ‘egg’: Written TibetanBoro (Bhat)Lushai (Lorrain)Proto-Karen (Luang.)OC (B-S)PST (tentative)! thul ‘egg, testicle’dəy ‘egg’tui ‘egg’Ɂdej B ‘egg’tʰu[n] ‘egg’#tʰurchu ‘water’dəy  ‘water, river’tui ‘water’thej A ‘water’s.turʔ ‘river, water’#s-turʔmchu ‘lip’(gusu)təy ‘lip’(not cognate)n.a.sə.dur ‘lip’#m-turThe expected rhyme correspondence for WT is -u, as shown by 'water' and 'lip'. What is going on ?Here is an idea. OC had an &#60;r&#62; infix that it shares with Austronesian and it would make sense if TB did, too. Some minimal pairs involving medial -r- and showing semantic alternations very much like Chinese can be found in TB languages:&#160; medial -r- calls attention to the distributed character of objects or actions. I treat medial -r- as the &#60;r&#62; infix in the pairs below:Written Burmese: pok ‘a drop (of liquid)’ : p&#60;r&#62;ok ‘speckled, spotted’Chepang: pop ‘lungs’ : p&#60;r&#62;op ‘lungs’Jingpo: phun31 ‘of lumps or pimples, to appear on the body’ : ph&#60;r&#62;un31 ‘pimples, lumps on the body; to appear on the body, of pimples or lumps’Such pairs are never found with alveolar initials; Zev Handel has claimed that *tr- clusters do not reconstruct to PTB or even PST (Handel 2002). Another possibility exists: *tr clusters (including infixal *t&#60;r&#62;- clusters) existed in PST but merged with *t- in PTB (this would constitute a TB innovation).There are no WT words of the shape CrVr, that is, with both medial -r- and final -r. In my first post to this blog (https://stan.hypotheses.org/11) I suggested that when that situation arose, for instance after the metathesis of preinitial -r, final -r dissimilated to -l. Supposing that a constraint on medial and coda r already existed in PST, a PST doublet involving a root *thur and the &#60;r&#62; infix would alternate *thur vs. *th&#60;r&#62;ul. By the changes described in my earlier posts, this doublet would evolve to PTB *thuy vs. *thul. In WT, *thuy would evolve to thu (chu if palatalized); but WT actually thul reflects PST *th&#60;r&#62;ul, the infixed variant.ReferencesHandel, Zev. 2002. Rethinking the medials of Old Chinese: Where are the r’s? Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 31.1:3-32.Sagart, Laurent. 1993. L'infixe -r- en chinois archaique. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, Tome LXXXVIII, fascicule 1, pp. 261-293.[cite]