AN native speaker/scholars

[John Myhill]

Continuing Wolfgang's point: I am not an Austronesian specialist myself, I am
more or less a typologist, and it is my impression (as I alluded in my last
message) that Austronesian linguistics is BETTER in this respect that many other
language areas, e.g. Native American languages, Australian languages, North
Caucasian languages, Altaic languages (other than Turkish), Khoisan
languages,
Nilotic languages, Afro-Asiatic languages (other than Hebrew and Arabic),
Niger-Congo languages, Sino-Tibetan languages (with the possible exception
of Mandarin Chinese, but even there I'm not sure)--all of these fields are
dominated to
a truly unhealthy extent by non-native speakers in a way worse than
Austronesian is. It is really only European languages, Japanese, Korean,
Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, a number of languages of India (Tamil,
Hindi, Kannada, Bengali), maybe Thai, where native speakers have as much of
a role in leading the field as would seem reasonable.
John Myhill

That doesn't mean the situation in Austronesian shouldn't be imp