Emaelivpeith Thomas R. Wier:
> Chris Bates wrote:
> > Just out of interest, I'm thinking about designing a pidgin-style
> > language (I need to research more how pidgins tend to be deficient as
> > compared to creoles and other languages) and then trying to do a massive
> > amount of grammaticalization + sound changes [...] It would be a more
> > interesting project than most "evolve a language from a proto-language"
> > project where the proto-language tend to already be "complete".
>
> I should probably warn you that most Creolists no longer believe
> in this view of creoles and pidgins. It's been fairly clearly
> shown by the likes of Michel Degraff and Salikoko Mufwene that
> creoles do not evolve out of pidgins, and that languages often
> called pidgins are often every bit as complete as regular languages.
> But otherwise, I think the project is an interesting one.
Oh dear! This is what I had been led to believe was the current
thought on pidgin > creole formation. Could you possibly point me to a
website or paper (on- or offline) that discusses this?
--
AA
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