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Re: Easy and Interesting Languages -- Website

From:<jcowan@...>
Date:Friday, May 28, 2004, 15:26
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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Mark P. Line <mark@...>