Several distinct strains of thought on subgrouping, presented in memory of David Watters and Michael Noonan, are united by a golden thread. Tamangic consists of Tamangish and maybe something else, just as Shafer would have wanted it. Tamangic may represent a wave of peopling which washed over the Himalayas after Magaric and Kiranti but before Bodish. There is no such language family as Sino-Tibetan. The term ‘trans-Himalayan’ for the phylum merits consideration. A residue of Tibeto-Burman conjugational morphology shared between Kiranti and Tibetan does not go unnoticed, at least twice. Black Mountain Mönpa is not an East Bodish language, and this too does not go unnoticed.

The present revised and expanded grammar of Dzongkha supersedes the earlier 1992 and 1998 English editions and the 2014 French edition of our Dzongkha language textbook. The grammar lessons in our Dzongkha language textbook have over the years appealed to an international readership eager to acquire a working command of Dzongkha, and this new textbook has been augmented with appendices in order better to serve our Bhutanese readership as well.