More on Hobbits

/. of the day: What’s your favorite vaporware?

John McWhorter on the native tongue of the hobbits (which has of course been mostly lost in the mists of time since the Third Age of Middle Earth):

This year, researching the languages of Indonesia for an upcoming book, I happened to find out about a few very obscure languages spoken on one island that are much simpler than one would expect….
[…]
So isn’t it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores…local legend recalls “little people” living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could “repeat back” in modern humans’ language.

Read more about it at GNXP.

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