Re: Polynesian family (was Re: A new Indo-European subfamily in China)

E-Ching Ng wrote:

>Before I go - I know that Japanese and Malay both have a question-marker
>"ka", though in Malay I think it can go anywhere in the sentence and in
>Japanese it has to be at the end.  I wonder if anyone's looked at Malay
>when trying to trace the origins of Japanese?
Yes. That is a very popular theory, but it is very tenuously supported. The
idea is that Japan was occupied by speakers of an Austroneasian language,
and that it was conquered by people speaking an Altaic language. Thus,
modern Japanese is largely Altaic with an Austronesian substrate.

I don't put much faith in the idea myself, because the evidence is so
tenuous. Basically a couple affixes that seem to be common to both, all of
them CV sequences. Given the small phonemic inventory involved, it would be
incredibly simple to have many accidental similarities. Until something
lexical comes around, the idea is no more than speculation, IMO.



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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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