On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 01:35:52PM -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote: > But then I thought about the great-great-grandparent effect (so to > speak). That could make a difference. Possibly, just barely enough of a > difference, even if gg-grandma normally raises baby, which seems very > unlikely!: 4000 (human-analogue years of language) divided by (4 You know, I now think all these mechanisms are red-herrings. The mechanism of language change is children listening to adults, gabbing with each other, and ending up agreeing on something other than the adults had. You want to stabilize language, fix the children. So maybe Dragaerans are genetically inclined to adhere more to the adult language. Or maybe the fact that they're children for 50-100 years by itself forces/allows them to not drift, because they have that much more time "to get it right". -xx- Damien X-)