I was acquainted with an expat couple here quite a while back, the wife was Indonesian and their babysitter was from the Central Highlands somewhere, but they were able to communicate verbally through similiarities in their native languages, pretty cool. Have you been to the Museum of Ethnography up in Hanoi? It's excellent 👍
From what I understand, there has been debate about where to place the Tai Kadai and Austroasiatic language families around 40 or 50 years ago that finally seemed to be resolved around 20 years ago. Most linguists now classify them as different language families, as you say. The difference between the classification systems is where you place a family on the language tree. The book used a slightly older system. I didn't want to deviate too much from the book's system because it was my main source. At one point, I wrote a draft where I discussed the difficulty of reconciling the different systems of the book and the more modern system, but I scraped that section because I thought it would be too boring to discuss.
I was acquainted with an expat couple here quite a while back, the wife was Indonesian and their babysitter was from the Central Highlands somewhere, but they were able to communicate verbally through similiarities in their native languages, pretty cool. Have you been to the Museum of Ethnography up in Hanoi? It's excellent 👍
Isn’t Tai-Kadai its own top-level language family rather than a branch of Austroasiatic?
From what I understand, there has been debate about where to place the Tai Kadai and Austroasiatic language families around 40 or 50 years ago that finally seemed to be resolved around 20 years ago. Most linguists now classify them as different language families, as you say. The difference between the classification systems is where you place a family on the language tree. The book used a slightly older system. I didn't want to deviate too much from the book's system because it was my main source. At one point, I wrote a draft where I discussed the difficulty of reconciling the different systems of the book and the more modern system, but I scraped that section because I thought it would be too boring to discuss.