Atkinson on phoneme inventories in Science

[Michael Cysouw]

Dear All,

given that we are now diving into a discussion of Atkinson's article, I would like to share with you a first very rough draft of a criticism of his approach. 

I think his attempt is brave, and actually I have been looking for years for such a nice global effect in the typological distribution of the world's languages. However, I have never been able to find anything which I would find conclusive, so I was rather shocked to see that it might have been as simple as three WALS chapters on phoneme inventories. Of course, I don't believe it, but well, the proof is in the pudding...

Just to summarize my current thinking (please see the attachment for the full current argumentation): I think the global effect is an artifact of the way the WALS data is used by Atkinson.

I welcome any suggestions for further steps: please send them to me personally. Also let me reiterate: I really welcome the kind of approach as proposed by Atkinson! However, I think we should be very conscious about what the data really mean. And it seems to me that Atkinson overshot this one.

best
michael

[see attached file: cysouwATKINSON.pdf]

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Michael Cysouw
Research Unit "Quantitative Language Comparison"
Faculty of Languages and Literatures
Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

http://www.lmu.de/qlc/

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