Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie Powell wrote:
> A trade language abandons that approach, and lets its speakers express all
> sorts of ideas very sloppily.  And the modern languages -- which IMO are
> descended from trade languages -- have reduced that grammatical sloppiness
> by adding layer upon layer of complexities (genders, cases, declensions,
> etc.) that the Stone Age languages lacked.
That's jumping to conclusions, don't you think?  I mean, there's so few
"stone age" languages to study, and those that exist are mostly in
certain areas, where areal features rule, thus what we're thinking are
features of "stone age languages" may very well simply be features of
those areas.  And most stone age languages *do* have genders, case,
etc.  Besides, languages are so changeable that any language can, given
enough time, become so radically different that its relationship is
imperceptible, it can go from any combination of features to any other
possible combination of features over enough time.

> So
> the Chinook Jargon's grammar cannot be due to European influence.  Yet its
> grammar is very much like that of all other "pidgins" -- and very unlike the
> grammar of the language of any tribe that shared that trade language!
Also, you're mixing another theory in with that.  You state that this
trade language shares many features with other pidgins around the
world.  Of course, if the universal grammar theory is correct, that's
*exactly* what you would expect.  If it has features in common with the
European languages, perhaps that's merely suggestive of a pidginization
of proto-Indo-European, rather than a common feature of "modern"
languages (unless by "modern" you mean "European")

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