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| ▲ | jcranmer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ridicter 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Even before the events of 1492 Indo-European had made it from Iceland (Vinland if you're nasty) to the Maldives. |
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| ▲ | verditelabs 43 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Vinland if you're nasty ? It's not controversial that the Norse made it to modern day Newfoundland. |
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| ▲ | wk_end an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 9dev 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | everdrive 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | ch4s3 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | decimalenough an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's even wider than that! Austronesian languages are spoken as far north as Taiwan and Vietnam, and as far east as Easter Island. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > 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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| ▲ | Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | weli 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | eschulz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | nephihaha an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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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