Who were the early scholars of Tibeto-Burman languages?

The study of Tibeto-Burman languages began in the mid-19th century, driven by British scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrators in India and Burma. Their initial efforts to document various "tribal" languages were compiled by Sir George Grierson in the Linguistic Survey of India (1903–1928).1

Significant advancements in the field occurred later through the following scholars:

• Robert Shafer: In the late 1930s, he led the Sino-Tibetan Linguistics project at the University of California, Berkeley. He organized extensive lexical material to propose a detailed taxonomic subgrouping of the family, which was later published in his Introduction to Sino-Tibetan.1
• Paul K. Benedict: Working from the same data in the early 1940s, he authored the influential manuscript "Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus." His structural insights allowed for more precise sound correspondences, and the 1972 publication of his work is credited with beginning the modern era of Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics.1

Additionally, Bernhard Karlgren contributed significantly to the field through his reconstructions of Old Chinese etyma in Grammata Serica Recensa (1957), which Benedict utilized in his own research.1