Comments for Replicated Typo

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size by Sean Roberts

Sean Roberts — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:33:00 +0000

Hi,

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. In the first case, I meant that the coefficeint for the number of surrounding families is greater than the coefficient for elevation. Population size is a better predictor in the sense that it has a lower p-value than elevation, so is better at predicting the presence of ejectives.

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size by Sean Roberts

Sean Roberts — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Good points!

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Brian S

Brian S — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:08:00 +0000

Great, sorry for the dumb questions and keep on the good work!

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size by Chris Lucas

Chris Lucas — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:05:00 +0000

Thanks a lot for following up on my comment - much appreciated. I like what you've done here. I will say though that I much prefer population size to number of languages spoken as a proxy for the relevant type of language contact. This is for two reasons. 1) I believe that there are certain areas of the world (usually mountainous areas!) where there are fairly large numbers of languages spoken relatively close to one another as the crow flies, but which do not have a significant history of contact because local geography makes this difficult. I believe highland PNG is an example of this, but others who know better can perhaps correct me here. 2) The second point bears on the third question in your post: What is the likelihood of keeping ejectives versus losing them during contact? The answer to this is that it depends on the type of contact. If the type of contact involves long-term stable bilingualism, then the likelihood of a language keeping ejectives and indeed passing them on to a contact language is high. Asya Pereltsvaig gives a number of examples of contact-induced spread of ejectives in the latest Geocurrents post. As pointed out by Trudgill in his 2011 book 'Sociolinguistic typology', long term stable bilingualism tends to lead to phonological and morphological complexification in the languages in contact. On the other hand, when contact involves large numbers of adults learning the language in question as a second language, this tends to result in phonological and morphological simplification. I would have thought that a language having a relatively large number of speakers is a reasonable indication that it has a history of this sort of contact. Or better: a language having a small number of speakers is a reasonable indication that it doesn't have this kind of history.

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size by Daniel Ezra Johnson

Daniel Ezra Johnson — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:26:00 +0000

When you say “the effect size is also greater” and later “is a better predictor” (elevation being the smaller/worse predictor), what do you mean exactly?

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Sean Roberts

Sean Roberts — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:22:00 +0000

Hi Chris, I followed your suggestion and looked at some proxies for langauge contact: see here

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size | Replicated Typo

Altitude and Ejectives: contact and population size | Replicated Typo — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:18:41 +0000

[...] the weekend I did an analysis about a recent paper by Caleb Everett linking altitude to the presence of ejective sounds in a [...]

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Sean Roberts

Sean Roberts — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:50:00 +0000

The elevation is still continuous. So, if there are two factors to a linguistic variable, it’s essentially a t-test.

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Ejectives, High Altitudes, and Grandiose Linguistic Hypotheses | GeoCurrents

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:27:20 +0000

[...] and Language Structure: The New Nomothetic Approach”. As Roberts notes in his ReplicatedTypo post, two other linguistic variables appear to be even more strongly correlated with altitude: Order of [...]

Comment on Altitude and Ejectives: Hypotheses up in the air by Brian S

Brian S — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:18:00 +0000

Oh, I see. So, how did you converted the continuous variable altitude into a discrete one? Which criterion did you use? Thanks Sean, and I hope to see more of this in the future!