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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Oldest attestation of Austronesian language: Äông Yên Châu inscription
esperent wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Interesting, this is about a 45 minute drive away from me and I've
never heard about it until now.
I can't find the exact location though, I wonder if it's open to the
public to visit?
bewresu wrote 7 hours 33 min ago:
obligatory explainer on symmetrical voice alignment:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOk--b_zSvE
contingencies wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the
longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or
the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da
Nang.
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n
weli wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Austronesian language family is wild. How could a language family be
spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind. At least
indo-european is connected by land, but an entire language family that
spans thousands of kilometers across sea sounds something straight up
from a Tolkien book.
tshaddox wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
It doesn't seem significantly more wild than the simpler observation
that all these islands are populated by humans. Surely the wild part
was that they got there, not that they brought their languages with
them.
decimalenough wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
It's even wider than that! Austronesian languages are spoken as far
north as Taiwan and Vietnam, and as far east as Easter Island.
wk_end wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
From a different perspective, it's not that wild at all - if you go
back far enough, there's a decent chance that we all speak languages
in the same "language family".
After all, being part of the same language family doesn't imply that
strong a connection - English resembles, say, Farsi very very little.
It just means that "the people who spoke language A at one point
split off from the same people who split off to speak language B".
From that angle, that the same language family is spoken in New
Zealand and Madagascar is roughly as wild as the fact that homo
sapiens lives in both places.
What's really wild is that modern linguistics has managed to
demonstrate that the Austronesian languages are related across those
vast distances and time spans.
saeranv wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
That presumes that languages didn't evolve independently across
different communities. The fact that different ancient languages
have completely different grammatical structures, for example,
provides some evidence of this.
ch4s3 wrote 8 hours 3 min ago:
> The fact that different ancient languages have completely
different grammatical structures, for example, provides some
evidence of this
It really doesn't provide that evidence. Proto-Afroasiatic the
oldest agreed upon hypothetical proto-language probably only
dates back 18,000 years. The modern brain, vocal, and tongue
structures linked to complex speech were in place 100,000 years
ago, and its thought that complex speech was in place by the time
Homo Sapiens left Africa 50-70,000 years ago. That's a long time
for grammar to diverge. Just in recorded history plenty of
languages have gained and lost very complex grammatical features.
Old Chinese for example was not a tonal language, but evolved
tones. Small isolated languages can change rapidly, and trade
languages tend to simplify.
9dev wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
If you generalise enough, all comparisons become useless: Sure, all
Sapiens have common ancestors.
That doesnât take away from the wonder of imagining people
thousands of years ago literally travelling across half the earth
to settle somewhere else, people we usually consider as extremely
different and more "primitive" than we are.
Learning that these people led in fact a life very similar to ours,
were intellectually equivalent to us, had the same struggles and
goals and aspirations we do (for the most part of course), is
deeply fascinating, to me at least.
BigTTYGothGF wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
Even before the events of 1492 Indo-European had made it from Iceland
(Vinland if you're nasty) to the Maldives.
verditelabs wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
> Vinland if you're nasty
?
It's not controversial that the Norse made it to modern day
Newfoundland.
BigTTYGothGF wrote 8 hours 33 min ago:
Yeah but they didn't stay.
jcranmer wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
It's worth reflecting on the fact that for most of human history, sea
travel is easier and faster than land travel. That's one of the main
reasons why major towns and cities are centered on river access.
ridicter wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
do you know how far madagascar is from easter island? if you're
talking about mediterranean and river travel, yes you're right. but
the pacific ocean + indian ocean are utterly massive.
jcranmer wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
I believe more trade between China and the Mediterranean was
transited via Indian Ocean trade routes than via the traditional
Silk Road, though I'm hard-pressed to find actual statistics.
alephnerd wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
Take a look at Ocean Current maps sometime [0].
It's easier to sail to and from Madagascar to much of Asia than
it is to sail to Madagascar across the Madagascar channel.
[0] -
(HTM) [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corrientes-ocean...
ridicter wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
I actually forgot that there is solid evidence now that
Austronesians made contact with South America. So that's even
crazier!
thaumasiotes wrote 13 hours 12 min ago:
> Austronesian language family is wild. How could a language family
be spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind.
Why? I assume you're familiar with the idea of the same language
being spoken in New Zealand and England?
eschulz wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
I consider the languages of Western European colonial powers to
have achieved a sort of heightened mobility when they more or less
mastered extensive sea travel.
Something that I've always found interesting is how the two large
Polynesian areas of Hawaii and New Zealand and currently dominated
by the English language, but this domination came to New Zealand
from the British Empire as it traveled east, while it arrived in
Hawaii from the United States traveling west.
The English language capturing the world is unlike anything else.
nephihaha wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
You can throw Samoa in there. All of it.
Tahiti and the Marquesas fell to French, and Rapa Nui/Easter
Island, to Spanish.
Arainach wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
There's a significant difference between intentional colonization
in the era of large ocean-crossing ships and languages spreading in
an era of smaller craft without a central goal of expansion.
tshaddox wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
The Austronesians also had ships deliberately designed to cross
the open ocean and had a culture that explicitly valued
exploration and expansion.
thaumasiotes wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
So? Both examples under discussion are intentional colonization
in dedicated ocean-crossing ships.
It's true that Polynesian ships are smaller than English ones.
But that makes no difference to... anything.
weli wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
I don't know. I kinda assume most language families are somewhat
land contiguous and I take indo-european as the exception that
confirms the rule. That's why austronesian is so interesting.
everdrive wrote 13 hours 51 min ago:
For this group of people their major technological advantage was sea
travel -- and due to this, other peoples could not actually compete
with them. They were the first and only settlers to these islands for
quite a while. Shockingly, Africans never colonized Madagascar until
relatively recently in history. "There is archaeological evidence
that Bantu peoples, agro-pastoralists from East Africa, may have
begun migrating to the island as early as the 6th and 7th centuries."
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar
ch4s3 wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
Yeah, the people who spoke early Indo-European languages used
chariots and wagons, so the land expansion makes sense and you can
even see the appearance of those languages reflecting terrain to
some extent.
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