
Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain - tintinnabula
http://news.sciencemag.org/2015/11/human-language-may-be-shaped-climate-and-terrain
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lgessler
This is a very misleading headline. As one commenter on the /r/linguistics
discussion[1] notes,

>"Although the findings remain purely correlational, and not based on any
experimental evidence", they use 10% of the world's languages, and the
ecological factors all taken together amount to 25% of the factors influencing
vowel/consonant distribution. Not very convincing.

The paper was given at a conference, so the findings are preliminary at best.
The connection between geography and characteristics of language is still very
poorly understood. For a similar idea, cf. Daniel Everett [of Pirahã fame]'s
son's paper claiming that ejectives are correlated with altitude[2].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3rluhy/human_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3rluhy/human_language_may_be_shaped_by_climate_and/)

[2]
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4685](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4685)

~~~
canjobear
Explaining 25% of the variance seems pretty respectable to me... certainly
consistent with a "human languages may be shaped by X" headline. No one's
claiming this is the _only_ thing shaping human languages.

Also, 10% of languages (about 600 languages) is basically as good as it gets
for linguistic typology studies. [1] argues that around 500 independent
languages is what you need to make strong claims about linguistic universals.

[1]
[http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Piantado...](http://tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_website/researchpapers/Piantadosi_and_Gibson_2014_CogSci.pdf)
(pdf)

~~~
panglott
That's an interesting paper, but what they conclude is that is effectively
impossible to get a sufficiently large sample to make strong claims for
absolute linguistic universals.

"It is important to emphasize one aspect of this analysis. The sampling
procedure we use assumed independent samples from the true distribution. This
means that what is really required is 500 independent languages, not 500
languages overall. For instance, Spanish and Italian do not count as two
separate languages in this analysis since they are genetically related. This
means that the real number of languages necessary may be much larger than 500
when sampling uses non-independent languages. Correlated samples will probably
increase the number of samples needed to stay below a given false positive
rate.

Note, though, that the languages need not be independent in all respects: They
need only be independent with respect to the relevant feature, which may be
possible in some cases. To the best of our knowledge, it will in general not
be possible to find 500 independent languages. There are, for instance, 212
language families in WALS, yet language families already are not independent
samples. More aggressive independence methods—based on, for instance,
geography (e.g., Dryer, 1989)—will likely arrive at much more independent
samples, but orders of magnitude fewer of them. This means that it is very
unlikely that statistical analysis will provide sufficient evidence to justify
absolute universals."

This is an interesting result, and confirms the poor history of reasoning
about the so-called "linguistic universals". They seem to be taken for granted
in generativist-influenced circles (rather than among linguistic typologists),
but they frequently get debunked soon after they are hypothesized.

------
panglott
Looks like a dubious correlation. Geographic language distribution patterns
are subject to the vicissitudes of migration, conquest, and technological and
environmental change. A lot of the features discussed are driven by outliers,
like the consonant-heaviness of the Caucasian or Salishan languages.

------
mc32
Or there is an account, perhaps apocryphal, of a royal's lisp resulting in the
shift from /s/ to /þ/ "th" in parts of Spain. For example the surname Perez is
still Peres in Portugal.

~~~
panglott
This is a well-known legend, but very unlikely.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanish_coronal_fricatives#Castilian_.27lisp.27)

