In a message dated 8/22/2004 1:56:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
mark@POLYMATHIX.COM writes:
>I think Piraha might be a creole that didn't evolve much beyond a pidgin
>precursor, for whatever reason. If something caused all the lexifier and
>substrate languages to cease to be spoken in the community, we might be
>left with a pidgin that only had whatever vocabulary it had accrued up to
>a certain point.
Wouldn't the "very complex morphological structure" [Everett's words] of
Piraha be highly atypical for a creole that hadn't evolved much beyond a pidgin?
Or am I thinking of "pidgins" and "creoles" too narrowly?
Doug