Austronesian language family is wild. How could a language family be spoken both in New Zealand and Madagascar blows my mind. At least indo-european is connected by land, but an entire language family that spans thousands of kilometers across sea sounds something straight up from a Tolkien book.
If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n
What's so incredible about this 4th cenrury inscription is that most the written words (Latin alphabets version) are very much intelligible to modern Astronesian language speakers for examples Malay and Indonesian (~300M), although the language were suppose to be older than the Old Malay.
As a comparison, the words from the Ireland Ogham stones from the same era (4th century) written in primitive Irish (before Old Irish) are not intelligible by the modern Irish Gaeilge speakers (~200K) [1].
If interested there is open source collection of Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā available online [2].
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 20.7 ms ] threadI can't find the exact location though, I wonder if it's open to the public to visit?
As a comparison, the words from the Ireland Ogham stones from the same era (4th century) written in primitive Irish (before Old Irish) are not intelligible by the modern Irish Gaeilge speakers (~200K) [1].
If interested there is open source collection of Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā available online [2].
[1] Ogham Stones [PDF]:
https://www.heritagecouncil.ie/content/files/Ogham-Stones.pd...
[2] Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā (Champa):
https://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/inscriptions/campa/inscrip...