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[Anthony Appleyard]

"David Sanchez" <davius_sanctex at terra.es> write:-
 > In a personal conversation with a member of this group, we wondered that
 > nahuatl can express so many terms with a very reducted set of radical
items.
...
 > In fact I've heard the number of radicals used is only around 1000!!!
 > This is a prototypical situation in PIDGINS and CREOLES ...
Or some ancestor of Nawatl underwent a bout of phonetic change that left it
with an excessive homophone overload, and for clarity it had to rename many
things. For example, in the history of English the duck (bird) had to get a
new name when its old name fell identical with the word "end". In Dutch they
are still distinct (`eend' = "duck", `eind' = "end"; the noun "duck" came from
the verb "duck" = "dive", compare Dutch `duiker' = "diver").