Washo, Simplified

I posted recently on my mental test of Washo, but it seemed appropriate to separate the results of that test from some speculations which arose from the difficulties experienced, cross-fertilized with thoughts from John McWhorter's Great Courses lecture series "The Story of Human Language" and some browsing of articles on Riau Indonesian. As I scoured a my gray fields for words in Washo, I thought to myself that simplified languages (creoles, mixed languages, and pidgins) start with a reduction of vocabulary to essentials. I recalled the words for "eat", "drink", "go", "have come", and so on, but remembered little of the specialized vocabulary. I remembered the words for "tree" and "rock", but not the species of those genera. The other possible simplification which I noted (but resisted for the sake of completing my test) was the difficulty in remembering the subject-object prefixes. Were I not such a diligent amateur linguist, I might have decided to forsake the daunting prefixal pine barrens in favor of the independent pronouns, easier to use. Why say "labali'a'" "he shot me", when you can say "le bali'a'" "he shot me", without having to consider the appropriate subject-object prefix and vowel harmony? I love the complexities of language, but that choice is based in aesthetics not pragmatism.

In reality, I could not imagine a mixed language developing which contained Washo as a component: the native speech community was too small and the Ute-Aztecan tribes around the Washoe formed a dialect continuum which offered a much better selection for a lingua franca - I am considering it for a Scout campfire. The Plains Native American seem to have preferred to learn Hand Talk (Plains Indian Sign Language) rather than yet another language with medium-complexity words such as "milelshymshihayasha'esi" "We two will not cause you to wake up."

A simplified Washo (and I am aware that the Washo with which I am familiar has already been simplified) would have the following features: it would be SOV, use independent pronouns where possible, and possess a reduced vocabulary. It would proabably use new words for negation and causation, since the current suffixes are too grammaticalized to survive (this isn't Esperanto, after all!). The glottal stop and the voiceless sonorant and liquids would disappear.