austronesian

They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence.

Like many other islands in the Pacific, Taiwan was mostly inhabited by Austronesian speakers until the arrival of European colonizers.

And this is way older than Mircea Eliade's rediscovery and popularization of the Austronesian word.

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.

Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis.

Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.

Similarly, southern Chinese languages feature borrowings from Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and Austronesian languages.

Should your hypothesis be correct, you would find haplogroups in the 45kya group descended from the 60kya austronesian group - but you do not.

The modern Austronesian peoples (most likely the descendants of the cave painters) are a three way hybrid between African, Neanderthal and the Denisovian humans [2].

I'm not saying there isn't a Austronesian connection, I just think an academic piece would do well to mention a credible second hypothesis.

Small multihull vessels are the hallmark of the Austronesian peoples, who are believed to have spread from Madagascar to Taiwan thence taken flight to populate the Pacific Ocean.

That's why austronesian is so interesting.

I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology.

My late father-in-law spoke a language, one of the Austronesian aboriginal languages of Taiwan, in which the word /mama/ indicated "father" rather than "mother." Several languages are like that, and some human languages do not have the word /mama/.

Austronesian languages are spoken as far north as Taiwan and Vietnam, and as far east as Easter Island.

Grammar will be absent to simplistic, with a Chinese/Tai-Kadai/Austronesian rather than Indo-Aryan structure (ie.

In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g.