Re: Hobbits, Austronesians, and Creoles
| From: | Thomas Wier <trwier@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, March 16, 2005, 19:29 |
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From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
John?!? Are you back on the list?
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Athey wrote:
> 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.
I would like to repeat that it is not at all clear when the
"little people" died out. There were reports from the 1600s
of Dutch sailors coming into contact with such people on Flores,
or hearing such reports, and since we know such people did at one
time exist relatively recently (in the grand scheme of things),
the stories cannot be discounted outright.
John McWhorter does in fact say lots of inane things, but based
on the facts of the case and based on what I hear other, less
credulous creolists say, I would say this is one of the less
inane things. Probably still wrong, though.
> 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...
Wait just a minute. Isolating languages *are* objectively simpler
when it comes to morphology. They tend, however, to make up for it
in complicated syntax, like English. Linguists don't think all
languages are equally complicated, just approximately equally complicated
varying less than an order of magnitude one from another.
=========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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