Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 06:34:03 -0400
From: Dr I Price <PEWLEYFORT@compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: memetic speciation?
To: "INTERNET:memetics@mmu.ac.uk" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Bill, and John W also [I liked your classification passage]
>>So, where do you put creoles in the classification system? If you look=
>at Ruhlen's book you'll find he has a Creole taxon at the top-level of
>his system. That implies that these languages have no parent language
>but the Ur-language of them all, which simply is not true. They have
>very identifiable parents - 2 or 3 or even more of them. But the
>classification system won't let you put such languages somewhere down in=
>the structure with links to all of the parents.><
Having just done some cursory reading on Creoles it strikes me
a. They seem to be a response to a dramatic, equilibrium punctuating even=
t
- forced colocation of different linguistic groups.
b. They might qualify as emergent phenomena out of a sudden new set of
memetic/linguistic connections
Why then should they be expected to fit a model of steadily branching
taxonomies? They do seem to fit an adaptive systems view of the process.
If
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