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--></style><title>Re: Atkinson on phoneme inventories in
Science</title></head><body>
<div><font color="#000000">Both Pericliev (2004) and, to a lesser
extent, Hay & Bauer (2007) were written in response to my<i>
Linguistic Typology</i> paper (Trudgill, 2004a). As I said in my reply
to Pericliev, and others who were invited to contribute to the same
issue of<i> Linguistic Typology</i> (Trudgill, 2004b), my
sociolinguistic-typological suggestion was never that there was any
sociolinguistic reason to suppose that there would be a
straightforward relationship between population size and phoneme
inventories. Rather, I proposed a number of social factors which, I
hypothesised, could be expected,<i> in combination</i>, to have
some influence on phoneme inventory size.</font></div>
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<div><font color="#000000">These factors are, as I discuss at greater
length in Trudgill (2011): small vs large community size; dense vs
loose social networks; large vs small amounts of communally shared
information; high vs low social stability; and low vs high degree of
linguistic contact. Most of these factors are less readily susceptible
to quantification than community-population size; and so it is not
surprising that it is this latter factor which statistically-minded
workers have for the most part concentrated on and
sampled.</font></div>
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<div><font color="#000000">In my forthcoming book (Trudgill, 2011),
however, I suggest that, while it is acknowledged that it is important
in constructing linguistic-typological samples to avoid areal and
genetic bias, there is also an insuperable problem of chronological
bias. We cannot make a genuine sample of all of the languages that
have ever existed; and if, as a consideration of the above five
sociolinguistic- typological factors suggests, modern languages are
not, as a whole and on average, typical of how languages have been for
most of human existence, then a representative modern sample will not
in fact be representative.</font></div>
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<div><font color="#000000">Peter<br>
<br>
Hay, Jennifer and Laurie Bauer. 2007. Phoneme inventory size and
population size.<i> Language</i> 83.388-400.<br>
Pericliev, Vladimir. 2004. There is no correlation between the size of
a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological
inventory of that language.<i> Linguistic Typology</i> 8.376-83.<br>
Trudgill, Peter. 2004a. Linguistic and social typology: the
Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories.<i> Linguistic
Typology</i> 8. 305-320.<br>
Trudgill, Peter. 2004b. On the complexity of simplification.<i>
Linguistic Typology</i> 8. 384-388.<br>
Trudgill, Peter. 2011.<i> Sociolinguistic typology: the social
determinants of linguistic structure and complexity.</i> Oxford:
Oxford University Press<br>
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