alt Hacker NewsAustronesian language family is wild. How could a language family be spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind. At least indo-european is connected by land, but an entire language family that spans thousands of kilometers across sea sounds something straight up from a Tolkien book.
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Even before the events of 1492 Indo-European had made it from Iceland (Vinland if you're nasty) to the Maldives.
For this group of people their major technological advantage was sea travel -- and due to this, other peoples could not actually compete with them. They were the first and only settlers to these islands for quite a while. Shockingly, Africans never colonized Madagascar until relatively recently in history. "There is archaeological evidence that Bantu peoples, agro-pastoralists from East Africa, may have begun migrating to the island as early as the 6th and 7th centuries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar
It doesn't seem significantly more wild than the simpler observation that all these islands are populated by humans. Surely the wild part was that they got there, not that they brought their languages with them.
From a different perspective, it's not that wild at all - if you go back far enough, there's a decent chance that we all speak languages in the same "language family".
After all, being part of the same language family doesn't imply that strong a connection - English resembles, say, Farsi very very little. It just means that "the people who spoke language A at one point split off from the same people who split off to speak language B". From that angle, that the same language family is spoken in New Zealand and Madagascar is roughly as wild as the fact that homo sapiens lives in both places.
What's really wild is that modern linguistics has managed to demonstrate that the Austronesian languages are related across those vast distances and time spans.
It's even wider than that! Austronesian languages are spoken as far north as Taiwan and Vietnam, and as far east as Easter Island.
> Austronesian language family is wild. How could a language family be spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind.
Why? I assume you're familiar with the idea of the same language being spoken in New Zealand and England?
It's worth reflecting on the fact that for most of human history, sea travel is easier and faster than land travel. That's one of the main reasons why major towns and cities are centered on river access.