Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

Mark P. Line scripsit:

> I therefore believe that anybody who wants to claim that Cham has never
> undergone creolization should be prepared to show evidence, and that the
> rest of us have no particular reason to believe it until she does.
In that case, I don't see that Thurgood's remark:

	Although it is
	quite evident that the language was heavily influenced by
	intense contact with the Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam,
	there is no historical data to suggest Cham ever underwent a
	pidginization stage; thus, there is no basis for attributing
	Cham's transparency to development from an earlier pidgin.

constitutes a *claim* that Cham is not a creole.

In any case, the maxim "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
must be taken with a grain of salt: after 100 coin-flips all coming up
heads, the betting is that the coin is either weighted or has two heads:
likewise, suspects against whom there is no evidence are cleared or
acquitted, not merely left as "not proven".

--
John Cowan  <jcowan@...>  http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.
                --Albert Einstein

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