French linguist and Sinologist Laurent Sagart considers the Austronesian languages to be related to the Sino-Tibetan languages, and also groups the Tai–Kadai languages as more closely related to the Malayo-Polynesian languages.
Sagart is probably best known for his proposal of the Sino-Austronesian language family.
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His recent work, in collaboration with William H. Baxter, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds on earlier scholarship and in addition takes into account paleography, phonological distinctions in conservative Chinese dialects (Min, Waxiang) as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietnamese, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Tai-Kadai.
He is currently collaborating with Laurent Sagart at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris on an improved reconstruction of the pronunciation, vocabulary, and morphology of Old Chinese.
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A competing Austro-Tai proposal linking Austronesian and Tai–Kadai is supported by Weera Ostapirat, Roger Blench, and Laurent Sagart, and is based on the traditional comparative method.