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Anton Sherwood scripsit: > If two languages on previously unexplored islands are found to share > most of their vocabulary but no grammatical forms, linguists generally > assume that one was "relexified" from the other by an event such as the > Norman conquest of England. Only if they share grammatical patterns are > they considered truly related. There are occasional counterexamples. That village on the Marathi/Kannada border has a local dialect of each language (and of Urdu, too) that match *perfectly* in morphology and syntax: only the vocabulary distinguishes them, and they are utterly distinct because of it. The assumption is that the dialects have accommodated to one another to the point where there is only one grammar in the speakers' heads. -- My corporate data's a mess! John Cowan It's all semi-structured, no less. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan But I'll be carefree jcowan@hidden.email Using XSLT http://www.reutershealth.com On an XML DBMS.