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Re: Hobbits, Austronesians, and Creoles

From:Kevin Athey <kevindeanathey@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 15, 2005, 14:30
>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 _________________________________________________________________ On the road to retirement? Check out MSN Life Events for advice on how to get there! http://lifeevents.msn.com/category.aspx?cid=Retirement

Replies

Joe <joe@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>