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From: draves@harvard.ARPA (Richard Draves)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Misc Language
Message-ID: <143@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 24-May-85 15:28:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: harvard.143
Posted: Fri May 24 15:28:38 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 26-May-85 23:38:54 EDT
References: <1134@uwmacc.UUCP>
Reply-To: draves@harvard.UUCP (Richard draves)
Distribution: net
Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard
Lines: 22
Summary: 

In article <1134@uwmacc.UUCP> dubois@uwmacc.UUCP (Paul DuBois) writes:
>> Also, I think you will find that most linguists would disagree about
>> the existance of a general tendency for "devolution" in languages,
>> all your examples are from the restricted set called Indo-European
>> languages which share a common heritage, and thus do not form an
>> independant sample. A wider sample shows much less of a uniform
>> tendency.
>
>Ah!  Maybe so.  Can you give this more than a handwave so that we have
>a chance to believe you?

If I remember correctly, there was an article on this in Scientific American
a while back.  It discussed the formation of creole languages from pidgins.
The creoles tended to be more complicated syntactically than the parent
languages.

Rich
-- 

	"a picture in the head is a gory murder in an art gallery"

					-- Stephen Kosslyn