Oldest attestation of Austronesian language: Đông Yên Châu inscription | Hacker News Reader

Oldest attestation of Austronesian language: Đông Yên Châu inscription

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69 pointsteleforce30 comments

Austronesian 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.

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

Yeah, the people who spoke early Indo-European languages used chariots and wagons, so the land expansion makes sense and you can even see the appearance of those languages reflecting terrain to some extent.

> 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?

I don't know. I kinda assume most language families are somewhat land contiguous and I take indo-european as the exception that confirms the rule. That's why austronesian is so interesting.

There's a significant difference between intentional colonization in the era of large ocean-crossing ships and languages spreading in an era of smaller craft without a central goal of expansion.

So? Both examples under discussion are intentional colonization in dedicated ocean-crossing ships.

It's true that Polynesian ships are smaller than English ones. But that makes no difference to... anything.

The Austronesians also had ships deliberately designed to cross the open ocean and had a culture that explicitly valued exploration and expansion.

I consider the languages of Western European colonial powers to have achieved a sort of heightened mobility when they more or less mastered extensive sea travel.

Something that I've always found interesting is how the two large Polynesian areas of Hawaii and New Zealand and currently dominated by the English language, but this domination came to New Zealand from the British Empire as it traveled east, while it arrived in Hawaii from the United States traveling west.

The English language capturing the world is unlike anything else.

You can throw Samoa in there. All of it.

Tahiti and the Marquesas fell to French, and Rapa Nui/Easter Island, to Spanish.

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.

do you know how far madagascar is from easter island? if you're talking about mediterranean and river travel, yes you're right. but the pacific ocean + indian ocean are utterly massive.

I actually forgot that there is solid evidence now that Austronesians made contact with South America. So that's even crazier!

Take a look at Ocean Current maps sometime [0].

It's easier to sail to and from Madagascar to much of Asia than it is to sail to Madagascar across the Madagascar channel.

[0] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corrientes-oceanicas...

I believe more trade between China and the Mediterranean was transited via Indian Ocean trade routes than via the traditional Silk Road, though I'm hard-pressed to find actual statistics.

> I believe more trade between China and the Mediterranean was transited via Indian Ocean trade routes than via the traditional Silk Road

At the time there was no Suez canal. Going from europe to China by sea would mean go around Africa which was a challenge by itself.

No, you'd go overland in Suez and then go down the Red Sea.

Although there was a Suez canal at various times in antiquity, albeit one between the Red Sea and the Nile, not the Mediterranean directly.

Even before the events of 1492 Indo-European had made it from Iceland (Vinland if you're nasty) to the Maldives.

> Vinland if you're nasty

It's not controversial that the Norse made it to modern day Newfoundland.

Yeah but they didn't stay.

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.

If you generalise enough, all comparisons become useless: Sure, all Sapiens have common ancestors.

That doesn’t take away from the wonder of imagining people thousands of years ago literally travelling across half the earth to settle somewhere else, people we usually consider as extremely different and more "primitive" than we are.

Learning that these people led in fact a life very similar to ours, were intellectually equivalent to us, had the same struggles and goals and aspirations we do (for the most part of course), is deeply fascinating, to me at least.

That presumes that languages didn't evolve independently across different communities. The fact that different ancient languages have completely different grammatical structures, for example, provides some evidence of this.

> The fact that different ancient languages have completely different grammatical structures, for example, provides some evidence of this

It really doesn't provide that evidence. Proto-Afroasiatic the oldest agreed upon hypothetical proto-language probably only dates back 18,000 years. The modern brain, vocal, and tongue structures linked to complex speech were in place 100,000 years ago, and its thought that complex speech was in place by the time Homo Sapiens left Africa 50-70,000 years ago. That's a long time for grammar to diverge. Just in recorded history plenty of languages have gained and lost very complex grammatical features. Old Chinese for example was not a tonal language, but evolved tones. Small isolated languages can change rapidly, and trade languages tend to simplify.

It's even wider than that! Austronesian languages are spoken as far north as Taiwan and Vietnam, and as far east as Easter Island.

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.

If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n

What's so incredible about this 4th cenrury inscription is that most the written words (Latin alphabets version) are very much intelligible to modern Astronesian language speakers for examples Malay and Indonesian (~300M), although the language were suppose to be older than the Old Malay.

As a comparison, the words from the Ireland Ogham stones from the same era (4th century) written in primitive Irish (before Old Irish) are not intelligible by the modern Irish Gaeilge speakers (~200K) [1].

If interested there is open source collection of Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā available online [2].

[1] Ogham Stones [PDF]:

https://www.heritagecouncil.ie/content/files/Ogham-Stones.pd...

[2] Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā (Champa):

https://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/inscriptions/campa/inscrip...

Interesting, this is about a 45 minute drive away from me and I've never heard about it until now.

I can't find the exact location though, I wonder if it's open to the public to visit?

obligatory explainer on symmetrical voice alignment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOk--b_zSvE

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