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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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 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.

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.

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