Zompist Bboard Again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy wrote:Maddieson and Coupe’s[9] study on 633 languages worldwide observed that some of the variation in the sonority of speech sounds in languages can be accounted for by differences in climate.

1. Most strikingly, implosives are found almost exclusively in the tropics (no source, but just look at the WALS map)
2. Ejectives are most commonly found at higher elevations (Everett 2013)
3. Tone is most common in hot and humid areas (Everett & Blasi & Roberts 2015)
4. ‘Languages in Drier Climates Use Fewer Vowels’ (Everett 2017)

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 6:22 pm Is this the Everett we all know and love?

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:57 pm I looked very briefly at one of these papers,enough to see that its database is WALS, with 527 languages.

This sort of this is likely to be garba--- ah wait, that's not very academic-- garbled, because languages are not randomly distributed. They are not randomly taken from the sea of possible languages; they are not independent bits of data. They are highly interrelated, they group up in families, they are highly affected by historical processes that are themselves dependent on geography, they are subject to areal effects, the best studied languages (i.e. WALS) are not representative of the whole 6000 or so in the world.

At the same time the sheer number of languages is so high that some wacky random hypotheses will end up "statistically significant". Ignoring the fact that statistical significance is defined for random independent events, which languages are not. "Statistically significant" doesn't mean that something is likely to be true; it's an evaluation that (say) you'd only expect that result in 5% of cases. It's often misused, because people forget that that means of 100 wacky random guesses, 5 will meet that threshhold by random chance.

The really interesting study would be of Everett's recycle bin. How many wacky hypotheses does he throw out compared to those that he gets into print?

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 11:19 pm Hard to tell between ecological influence and feature diffusion macroareas. Most such macroareas are equatorial. Definitions are hard, but regardless of how you slice it, there aren't many in the frozen north - Finnish looks a lot like Inuktitut, and there are probably grammatical similarities. Unusually large case systems? Dunno.

But if ecological influence suggests that certain things hold in cold temperatures, the languages of the southern tip of South America should look, if not Hyperborean, then at least a little Borean. Shouldn't they? I don't think they do. Phonologically, Selk'nam and Kawesqar look much more Californian than Arctic. Yahgan looks a little like Chukchi, I guess, but Chukotko-Kamchatkan is clearly on the periphery of the West Coast macroarea anyway - Itelmen more so than Chukchi (ejectives), but the vowel harmony is similar to what must be assumed for an earlier stage of Sahaptian.

And if Yahgan looks like Chukchi, well, they're both peripheral, so maybe they inherited the effects of older diffusion processes and never had time to get the new ones.

Like how a fortis/lenis contrast in resonants used to be common across Western Europe but today is only preserved in a few Gaelic dialects.

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 1:44 am I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that two languages in similar climates should look identical — just that they should be similar in some ways. For instance, those correlations I mentioned above predict that polar languages should have no implosives, no tone, large(ish) vowel systems and possibly ejectives. Does that sound about right for the South American languages? I don’t know enough about Borean and Notean languages to assess this properly.

I’ve never heard of this before; do you have any more info? I’m surprised to hear that voiceless resonants were once common in the area.

alice wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 9:07 am It would be more useful to be able to *predict* a phoneme inventory from its ecology. One can imagine, for example, a language spoken in Antarctica to make much use of the biabial trill.