IE creole?

[manaster at umich.edu]

I agree with Jens, of course.  And would just add this:
it is a really bad habit to use terms like 'creole' loosely.
IE could perhaps be a "creole" in the same sense that
English or Polish are "creoles", i.e., languages with
some elements from source X and some from source Y,
but then every language would be a "creole".

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

[snip]

> I must object to the idea that PIE arose by creolization. PIE is a
> language of a most complex type.

[snip]

> Creoles arise under immense time pressure when speakers of one language
> have to communicate with speakers of another before they have had a chance
> to learn it properly. Therefore, creolization invariably leads to gross
> simplifications, uniformity of stems and formatives, i.e. the exact
> opposite of what we find in Indo-European.