For example (and I don't know the appropriate terminology), are there more guttural sounds, or more long vowels, or more monosyllabic words in hotter / colder / wetter / dryer areas (historically)?
Posted Jun 21, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC
There's an interesting study from this year that links humidity to tonality. Haven't read it tho. http://m.pnas.org/content/112/5/1322
It's highly flawed. They don't provide any experimental data, and the whole thing amounts to an assumption that correlation equals causation. They make a little bit of an effort at pointing to other research (namely, the Journal of Voice article, I forget the author) but don't really establish that the research they're pointing to is relevant to the matter at hand. Honestly, after reading the article cited, I feel like they (slightly, and likely accidentally) overstated the meaningfulness of the previous research in regards to their proposal.
These kinds of correlations have been known for a while. What's lacking is any evidence that they are due to an actual influence from the environment. So far, this line of inquiry hasn't found any positive results. Really, it's not surprising that adding big data to the mix would result in some statistically significant correlations, that's exactly big data's main issue. It can often churn out statistically significant results that aren't meaningful.
Anyway, these papers are interesting avenues for further research, but don't really establish a mechanism for influence between the environment and the languages spoken in an environment. It'd carry a lot more weight if any of them were backed up by any experimental data, or if there were any attempt made to demonstrate why an environmental cause is more persuasive than more conventional explanations for their distribution.
Anyway, earlier efforts to investigate this sort of correlation have all wound up not panning out. Everett has had a couple papers in this vein the last couple years, but his antagonism toward linguistics as a field (and, to be fair, most linguist's antagonism toward his research) hasn't helped with any follow-up yet. At this point, both are probably best tentatively classed as "interesting, though possibly spurious". I have reason to suspect that one of them may be an artifact of other issues, though, which could be interesting.
these papers are interesting avenues for further research, but don't really establish a mechanism for influence between the environment and the languages spoken in an environment.
One thing I liked about the tone complexity and humidity paper is that the hypothesized physiological cause is pretty reasonable. They cite a number of papers looking (experimentally) at how the larynx is affected by dryness. Of course, merely citing such papers doesn't establish a causal link, and one of my biggest problems with the paper is the seemingly arbitrary, and possibly overly simple, criterion for what counts as a complex tone language.
I found it far more plausible that dryness could affect the larynx in linguistically interesting ways than that elevation could influence the presence of ejectives as a mechanism for conserving body heat, which, if I'm remembering correctly, was the argument in that paper.
The only citation that has any plausible tie to tone production was the one concerning vocal jitter resulting from exposure to extremely dry air in a clinical setting. They don't test whether that degree of jitter is sufficient to influence communication, or even propose a test. While I don't remember the details, the likelihood of that seemed a lot less after having read the paper than Evans et. al.'s summary of it.
That's completely leaving aside their poor choice of database. The whole "toneless/simple tone/complex tone" categorization isn't the most helpful to begin with, and has some problems with consistency of application. Sticking strictly to lexical tone and testing correlation to number of tones, or categories based on numbers of tones would have been better. Even categorizing based on register or contour tones (which is still a bit of an arbitrary distinction) would have been better.
The main argument made in the elevation paper had to do with differences in the amount of force required to attain sufficient vocal stricture at different altitudes due to differences in air pressure. Skipping over the statistical and theoretical problems to avoid beating an already thoroughly dead horse, its an easily testable proposal that the author doesn't test or even propose a test for.
The main thing these two papers have in common is that the authors find a correlation, propose a completely testable hypothesis for a causative mechanic, then conclude a causative relationship without actually testing anything. The moisture/tone paper even concludes with a little rant strongly implying that any rejection of these sorts of proposals is due to antireductionism and theoretical bias. Basically, they're not going to do any empirical testing, but if you doubt their conclusions YOU'RE the one being unscientific.
This is better than whatever Everett came up with for "explaining" the relationship between ejectives and elevation. Faint praise, I know...
This is related to my concerns about tone complexity, as well. Even if, as seems plausible to me, dry air causes problems for fine-grained control of vocal folds, it's not at all obvious that languages with 3+ tones (their definition of complexity) necessarily require that much more fine-grained control than do languages with 2 tones.
It also seems to me that other phonological units that require fine-grained control of the vocal folds (e.g., creaky voice) should be similarly affected by ambient humidity.
I wish I could find the one my phonetics professor showed me. It has graphs of relative humidity and stuff, was more scientific, but the one I posted was the closest. I know it's not perfect tho, as you pointed out.
Thanks for the link, I'll check that out!
Nope. There are papers that claim such links (high elevation to tonality, for instance), but none are well-regarded by linguists.
In my opinion, the elevation paper was pretty weak, but the more recent paper on tone complexity and humidity is better (see u/mattymatt223's comment). It's not perfect, of course, but no research is perfect.
Thank you!