In light of Ratliff's (2000) demonstration that the classifier system in the Hmong-Mien languages is borrowed from Chinese, the antiquity of a weakly classifying prefix system that roughly corresponds to broad semantic categories of nouns is supported by showing that it is best preserved in the Hmong-Mien languages that have had least historical contact with Chinese & that its phonological structure, comprising a reduced phonemic inventory & typologically similar to the sesquisyllabic form of Mon-Khmer & Tibeto-Burman languages, provides convincing explanations of initial consonant alternations in basic vocabulary items in terms of prefix vowel loss & consonant cluster reduction. Even across closely related dialects of Hmongic languages, however, striking variation is found in the prefixes attached to specific noun cognates; consequently, it is proposed that a prefixal slot be reconstructed for Proto-Hmong-Mien nouns with variation in the specific lexical distribution of prefixes in the protolanguage. References. J. Hitchcock