> I've heard speculation that the Esselen language has some grammatical
> resemblences to Polynesian languages. Anyone care to have a go at this?
Lots of unrelated languages have grammatical resemblances to each other.
The range of grammatical phenomena in human language is comparatively small,
though much larger than dreamed of by the insular in spirit. Languages are
only considered related if they have predictable sound correspondences in
words and grammatical morphemes plausibly similar in meaning, i.e.,
sets of related sound/meaning pairs. Moreover, there have to be enough of
these correspondences to convince others that they are not coincidental.
There are some fairly remarkable coincidences attested, but they always
involve a small handful of words or morphemes.