Around a third of the vocabulary differences between modern Bantu speakers arose this way, around a fifth of the differences between speakers of Indo-European languages, and around a tenth of the Austronesians.
But contact between speakers of different languages did give English a habit of accepting different ways of saying things, such as both the king's son (typically Germanic) and the son of the king (typically French).In any case, variety is not the same thing as the "complexity, ambiguity and doubt" Mr Heller fears.
The speaker array covered a range of ±100° in azimuth with an angular separation between speakers of 10°.
There his fluency in English and Dutch proved useful to him as an intermediary between speakers of those languages, and he was soon appointed the town clerk and secretary of New York's board of commissioners for Indian affairs.
Other applications mentioned are theories of vision, databases, robot design, mathematical proofs, information exchange between speakers of particular language, and cognitive science as a whole.
However, with the available sample size (52 English speakers and 150 non-English speakers), there is about 80% power to detect a 20% difference in the primary end points between speakers of different languages.
In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish.
Dutch emerged as a structurally distinct branch of West Germanic as the result of language contact between speakers of North Sea Germanic and speakers of the South Germanic "Franconian," or Frankish.
At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages.
