Atkinson on phoneme inventories in Science

[Claire Bowern]

In recent work by colleagues and myself on loan rates in 'small' groups
(both hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist, under 10,000 speakers), we found
no correlation between loan rates and population size or density. We did
find a correlation between mobility and loans but in North America mobility
was a predictor of low loan rates, whereas in Australia it was a predictor
of high loan rates. The sample is 122 languages from Australia, North
America, and South America.
Claire

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Peter Trudgill <peter.trudgill at unifr.ch>wrote:

>  Both Pericliev (2004) and, to a lesser extent, Hay & Bauer (2007) were
> written in response to my* Linguistic Typology* paper (Trudgill, 2004a).
> As I said in my reply to Pericliev, and others who were invited to
> contribute to the same issue of* Linguistic Typology* (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,* in combination*, to have some influence on phoneme inventory
> size.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Peter
>
>
> Hay, Jennifer and Laurie Bauer. 2007. Phoneme inventory size and population
> size.* Language* 83.388-400.
> 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.* Linguistic Typology* 8.376-83.
> Trudgill, Peter. 2004a. Linguistic and social typology: the Austronesian
> migrations and phoneme inventories.* Linguistic Typology* 8. 305-320.
> Trudgill, Peter. 2004b. On the complexity of simplification.* Linguistic
> Typology* 8. 384-388.
> Trudgill, Peter. 2011.* Sociolinguistic typology: the social determinants
> of linguistic structure and complexity.* Oxford: Oxford University Press
>
>
>


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Claire Bowern
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics
Yale University
370 Temple St
New Haven, CT 06511
North American Dialects survey:
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~clb3/NorthAmericanDialects/
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