The origin of Mayan languages from Formosan language group of Austronesian
This addresses the historical linguistics problem of tracing language origins for researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing comparative methods and data.
The study investigated the origin of Mayan languages by comparing basic body-part names with non-Mayan vocabulary, finding that 17.5 out of 23 cognate items had their most similar cognates in Austronesian, with a significant concentration in Formosan (P < 0.001), leading to the conclusion that Mayan languages derived from Formosan.
Basic body-part names (BBPNs) were defined as body-part names in Swadesh basic 200 words. Non-Mayan cognates of Mayan (MY) BBPNs were extensively searched for, by comparing with non-MY vocabulary, including ca.1300 basic words of 82 AN languages listed by Tryon (1985), etc. Thus found cognates (CGs) in non-MY are listed in Table 1, as classified by language groups to which most similar cognates (MSCs) of MY BBPNs belong. CGs of MY are classified to 23 mutually unrelated CG-items, of which 17.5 CG-items have their MSCs in Austronesian (AN), giving its closest similarity score (CSS), CSS(AN) = 17.5, which consists of 10.33 MSCs in Formosan, 1.83 MSCs in Western Malayo-Polynesian (W.MP), 0.33 in Central MP, 0.0 in SHWNG, and 5.0 in Oceanic [i.e., CSS(FORM)= 10.33, CSS(W.MP) = 1.88, ..., CSS(OC)= 5.0]. These CSSs for language (sub)groups are also listed in the underline portion of every section of (Section1 - Section 6) in Table 1. Chi-squar test (degree of freedom = 1) using [Eq 1] and [Eqs.2] revealed that MSCs of MY BBPNs are distributed in Formosan in significantly higher frequency (P < 0.001) than in other subgroups of AN, as well as than in non-AN languages. MY is thus concluded to have been derived from Formosan of AN. Eskimo shows some BBPN similarities to FORM and MY.