An Interesting Proposition

    I'm taking a class here at Berkeley on Pidgins and Creoles, and our big
assignment is to study one Pidgin or Creole and write a 25 page paper on it
(I guess this means history, conventions they use, or...something; haven't
gotten much info on what exactly it's supposed to be).  But, of course, since
I create languages, my first idea was, "Hey, why not create a Pidgin out of
two existing languages, say, French and Arabic?"  I didn't know if this idea
would fly, so I went up to the professor and asked, "What about creating a
Pidgin?  Could we do that?"  He thought for a few seconds and told me that it
had already been done once, but not well.  Then he started explaining it to
me, and I realized he was talking about something completely different.
    Apparently, what had been done (and, what it looks, I'm going to do), is
that a couple of researchers got a group of people together, gave them a list
of about 100-500 essential words, and had them talk for about two hours only
using those words.  And, of course, it wasn't just one two-hour meeting, but
several.
    So, it looks like not only am I going to have a created language (Pidgin,
though it be) known to the linguistics community here, but I'm going to have
about 12 people that will speak it.  ~:D

-David