> > English has all the features of creolisation
> Not according to Romaine, as reported in McMahon, _Understanding Language
Change_; she considered thirty pan-creole features and found that Modern
English has very few of them. From a historical point of view, of course,
it lacks the most basic feature: there is no evidence of a break in
transmission. See also the extensive discussion in Thomason & Kaufman,
Section 9.8. It does not seem useful to conflate creolization and
contact-induced change in general. Brian
When different languages come in contact, one distinction is that between
mutually unintelligible languages & mutually intelligible ones. Perhaps the
loss of declension in English vs German is due to the melting together of
the mutaully intelligible Saxon, Anglian, Frisian & Danish dialects? The
core of the words seems to have been more stable than the affixes.
Marc