Re: Hobbits, Austronesians, and Creoles

>From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001984.html
This is garbage.

First of all, Proto-Austronesians did not, I believe, even come to Flores
until long after H. florensis became extinct.  Even if that were not the
case, SO much language change happens in 13,000 years that any trend caused
by such an interaction would be burried in time.

Furthermore, the isolating nature of a language does NOT make it a simpler
language.  As a speaker of English, the author SHOULD be aware of this...
Neither does such a nature make it less related to the languages in its
family.  In fact, a lot of Austronesian languages have what are better
classes as clitics than affixes.

As for evidence of old affixes, I am incredulous.  No examples of how these
languages syntacticly render what their sister-languages use affixes to
render are given.  It seems unlikely that the author actually has a working
knowledge of either language.

I'll stop this ranting now.  Without doing my own research, beyond this
point I'll simply repeat the author's mistakes in the other direction.

Athey

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