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[Anthony Appleyard]

"David Sanchez" <davius_sanctex at terra.es> wrote:-
 > 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 ...
With "ankle", the same is true for English. It looks like a simple root
word, but it came not from its own root but from the Common Indo-European root
{ang} = "narrow".
Likeways English "elbow", which came from two roots meaning "forearm bend".
The same happened in French with the bee :: its Latin name "apis" reduced in
French via "ef" to merely "e" (which should have an acute accent), which is so
easily lost among other words that part of France renamed it the "honey fly"
(mouche-a`-miel) and part took the word "abeille" from Occitanian.
Citlalyani