HELP: Watch to do with outdate material

I'm reading through Payne's "Describing Morphosyntax" and discovering
all sorts of things I'd like to tweak in Asha'ille. For example, I may
decide to have non-main clauses use a different word order than main
clauses, at least in some situations.

What have others done to deal with this kind of problem (since I
assume others have also run into it)? It seems to me that the larger
or more fundamental the change, the less believable it is to simply
claim the old versions as a dialectal variation or previous stage of
the language.

How often is contact with other languages enough to change a
language's grammatical structures? Under what conditions can that
happen, and to what extend are the likely changes?

Any advice or comments from the field appreciated! Vep'adáshandim
kachera! ("Thank you for future replies!" :)


--
AA

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