The following basic vocabulary of 400+ words includes all items on the Swadesh 100 Word List, and all on Matisoff's 200 Word List. I have added another 200 of my own. (Numbers following entries correspond with item numbers on Matisoff's list.) Main entries (in bold) are for the Takale dialect of Kham. Where possible, reconstructions are provided for Proto-Kham, with supporting evidence from major Kham dialects. Tibeto-Burman reconstructions are, for the most part, from Benedict's Conspectus. The intermediate reconstructions, which I have called Himalayish, are from my own notes, and still very tentative. (I am no longer aware of the sources for many of the individual items; they have been gleaned from published and unpublished sources over the course of many years.) Nevertheless, I list the following, which were used often:

Benedict, Paul K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan, a conspectus. Contributing editor, James A. Matisoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Caughley, Ross. n.d. Chepang word lists. Unpublished manuscript. (Superseded by): 2000. Dictionary of Chepang. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Glover, W. W., Glover, J. R., Gurung, Deu Bahadur. 1977. Gurung–Nepali–English dictionary. Pacific Linguistics, Series C, 51.

Hale, Austin, ed. 1973. Clause, sentence, and discourse patterns in selected languages of Nepal, Vol. IV: Word lists. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Oklahoma.

Jäschke, H. A. 1881, reprinted 1975. A Tibetan–English dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Matisoff, James A. 1978. Variational semantics in Tibeto-Burman: the ‘organic’ approach to linguistic comparison. Philadelphia: ISHI.

Shepherd, Gary. n.d. Magar word lists. Unpublished manuscript.