Re: Hobbits, Austronesians, and Creoles
| From: | Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, March 15, 2005, 19:44 |
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John Cowan wrote:
Conservative Grumpy AN-ist speak-um:
Let's not get carried away with the Hobbit stuff, eh?
Flores and neighboring islands are indeed little-investigated, but various
Dutch RC missionaries were there in the 19-20 centuries and probably
Port/Span. before that. (And I think the SIL is there now.)So it's not a
total linguistic terra incognita sive mysteriosa-- though archeologically
and anthropologically it may well be. I know of a Sika wordlist from 1890; a
Ngadha grammar/dict/texts from the 1920-30 period (Fr. Arndt), as well as a
MA or PhD thesis from Michigan by native speaker Stephanus Djawanai (70-80s,
published, I think); a large dictionary of Manggarai from the 60-70 period
and subsequent publications by one Fr. Dj. Verheijen-- the dict. is so full
of citations from other langs. and dialects that sometimes it's hard to be
sure which language the head entries refer to...But the material has proven
useful in comparative studies.
Ngadha, Manggarai are indeed rather poor in the morphology dept., but they
are not "weird"-- they are typical for the area; Ngadha and closely related
Lio are quite widely spoken IIRC.
And students and I in Indonesia worked with a Ngadha (BTW it's ['Na.?da])
speaker for a 2-month field methods course. And yes, it is quite
analytical-- no affixes or morphology that I recall, and that seems to be
true of other Flores languages. The Indo. students found Ngadha quite
amusing for that reason, also for its fairly constant CVCV form, which made
it rather jingly but fun to speak. Rather like bad Indonesian :-))) Does
that make it a pidgin/creole? Only if loss of morphology necessarily proves
that those processes have occurred, and I doubt it does. Just my NSHO.
The langs. I've mentioned are Austronesian-- "obvious upon inspection", with
regular/expected sound changes and lots of familiar vocab., albeit filtered
through several intermediate stages, principally through something we can
call "Central Malayo-Polynesian", generally the proto-lang. of every AN
lang. in the Moluccas/Lesser Sundas east of the Wallace Line. Yes, there are
some untraceable words; there are also lots of common words restricted--
AFAWK-- to the eastern islands. Subgrouping these languages is one of the
Last Frontiers of comparative Indonesian linguistics, and difficult because
there is only legendary info about movements/migrations/trade within the
area. (The Kei claim they came from Bali; some Leti claim to have come from
Kei, etc. etc. We do know that the Dutch, in a snit, forcibly removed the
population of the Banda Islands in the 17th C.-- two communities survive on
Kei.)
The writer's crucial assumption is that Hobbits survived much longer than
13000BCE. But assuming that AN people arrived in E.Indonesia between 3-2000
BCE (which is a guess), and if the Hobbits indeed died out around 13,000
BCE, ANs came in contact only with the Papuan peoples who had already been
there for a very long time (and who would have coexisted with the
"Hobbits"). This shows up in the physical appearance of some easterners (our
Ngadha speaker had kinky hair, but a thin nose and ordinary Indo. skin
color; others have more definite "Negroid" features); and in the remaining
pockets of non-AN languages round and about (islands to the E of Flores, and
Timor, at least). Legends about the "little people" could well have been
adopted from them.
The whole Hobbit thing is truly fascinating, but I wish everyone would sit
back, take a deep breath, and wait for more research to develop. (Is it
possible, for ex., to extract DNA from bones that old??)
And although I hesitate to say anything about the author (unknown to me) of
the page you cited, the general "Oh wow! isn't this weird!" tone suggests
that he has picked up an imaginary ball and is headed for imaginary goal
posts.........
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