Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[Swammerdami]

Examples of sound changes and semantic shifts

Here's an example of four different English words, all meaning 'leader of a group' and cognates of each other: ... The four different initial sounds (H, K, CH, SH) are all due to regular sound changes ...

Unidirectional changes of this sort are called "implicational universals", because they tend to hold across all human languages, although one does find occasional counterexamples. The point is that linguists discovered these types of universals in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the famous Prague School linguist, Roman Jakobson.
...
But how do you know what the original sound was in the protolanguage? It is unlikely to be just any sound. If you have a knowledge of common unidirectional sound changes, you can infer the original sound by tracing back to it via implicational rules.

These words have all changed their original PIE meaning, which was 'top part of an animal's body.' Just as many sound changes are one-way streets (K can mutate to CH but seldom vice versa), so this semantic shift is one-way. To fill the gap when a word shifts from 'top of animal' to 'leader', a word for 'jug or bowl' may come to mean 'top of animal' by shape analogy (German Kopf or English 'jughead'!) The French word tête has undergone both these transitions: 'cup' [Latin testa] > 'top of animal' > 'leader.'

I haven't seen much literature on the subject of semantic implicational universals, and the reason for the phonological universals can be linked to the physical difficulties inherent in the articulation of sounds. So I would be much more skeptical that one can establish implicational universals for semantic shifts quite as convincingly as Jakobson did for sound shifts.

I was intrigued by this comment. Semantic shifts may be much less regular than sound changes, but there are repeating patterns, and the changes may be unidirectional. For example the two changes I mentioned:
. . . . cup > head
. . . . head > leader
have occurred in multiple languages and, or so my intuition tells me, much less likely to occur in the opposite direction.

Here are some other semantic shifts mentioned in a Lyle Campbell textbook, observed in more than one language, and in most cases likely to be one-directional. The first three are shifts due to euphemism.

. . . . sleep/kiss/lay > copulate
. . . . medicine > poison
. . . . girl/child > prostitute

. . . . horse-rider > gentleman
. . . . silver > money
. . . . journal/daily > newspaper
. . . . cool > relax
. . . . excellency > you (polite)

Surely there are other, better, examples of common semantic shifts.

 

[lpetrich]

PHOIBLE 2.0 -

PHOIBLE is a repository of cross-linguistic phonological inventory data, which have been extracted from source documents and tertiary databases and compiled into a single searchable convenience sample. Release 2.0 from 2019 includes 3020 inventories that contain 3183 segment types found in 2186 distinct languages.

It uses the  International Phonetic Alphabet but it is rather strict, distinguishing short and long vowels, and also modified consonants like aspirated ones.

One can see how common each phoneme is with PHOIBLE 2.0 - Segments

Looking under PHOIBLE 2.0 - Inventories I found PHOIBLE 2.0 - Inventory English (American) (UZ 2175) and PHOIBLE 2.0 - Inventory English (British) (UZ 2178)

Though /p/, /t/, /k/ are very common sounds, those pages list English as having the aspirated variants /p^h/, /t^h/, /k^h/ which are much less common: /k/ is 90% and /k^h/ 20%. However, it lists those variants as having allophones /p/, /t/, /k/.

So I'd have to download the databases and look through them for languages with neither /k/ is 90% nor /k^h/.

 

[lpetrich]

WALS Online - Home has some such results.

WALS Online - Chapter Consonant Inventories -- the smallest is of Rotokas, with /p t k b d g/ -- all stops, no nasals (/n/, /m/, /ng/, ...), no fricatives (/f/ /v/ /s/ /z/ ...), no affricates (/ts/ /dz/ ...), ...

WALS Online - Chapter Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives -- does it treat (for example) stops /t/ /d/ as separate? Or fricatives /s/ /z/ as separate? Voicing in fricatives but not stops was not as common as the three alternatives.

WALS Online - Chapter Absence of Common Consonants -- the large majority of languages have fricatives, nasals, and bilabials (/p/ /b/ /v/). 1/10 of them lack fricatives, some 1/50 lack nasals, and some 1/100 lack bilabials. There was only one each of languages that lack nasals and either bilabials or fricatives.

WALS Online - Chapter Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems -- of /p/ and /b/, /p/ sometimes drops out. Likewise, of /k/ and /g/, /g/ sometimes drops out.

WALS Online - Feature 19A: Presence of Uncommon Consonants - (/th/ /dh/) fricatives, notably present in English, are present only about 1/10 of the time that they are absent. Likewise, labial-velar stops (/k-p/ /g-b/) are present only about 1/10 of the time that they are absent. They are mainly present in West Africa and in eastern New Guinea, but seldom elsewhere.

WALS Online - Chapter Vowel Quality Inventories - languages differ in how many phonemically different vowels that they have. English has a relatively large number of vowel phonemes, and Spanish an average number.

 

[lpetrich]

WALS Online - Chapter The Velar Nasal - the "ng" sound.

About half of the sample does not have /ng/ as a separate phoneme, though it may have it as an allophone of /n/ or /m/.

Of the other half, 2/3 of them can have /ng/ be an initial consonant, and English is one of the 1/3 which can't.

WALS Online - Chapter Syllable Structure -- English is on the complex side, allowing plenty of initial and final consonant clusters, like "stink" -- CCVCC (C = consonant, V = vowel).

The type that is always present is CV. Some languages add V (vowel alone), combined as (C)V.

Moderate complexity is CCV, CVC, CCVC, VC, usually with the second consonant in a cluster being limited to liquids /r/ /l/ or glides /j/ /w/ (/j/ is English y).

 

[Copernicus]

If one studies articulatory phonetics, then it is possible to rank sounds in terms of the complexity of articulation required to physically produce a sound or sound combination. Logically, the most complex sounds will come with the greatest number of ways to mispronounce them. For example, a voiceless consonant like bilabial [p] is produced by closing the lips and releasing them as air passes through the oral cavity. Air passes freely across the glottis without phonation (vocal vibration). The bilabial [b] is produced the same way, except that phonation is required simultaneously. Therefore, [b]is more complex. It can be mispronounced by failing to maintain simultaneity of lip closure and vocal vibration.

Why is this significant? Because it explains why a lot of languages have devoicing processes--for example, final devoicing in languages like Russian and German. English-learning children may tend to mispronounce /b/ as [p] in the early stages of language acquisition by either failing to voice the /b/ or failing to shut down or start up phonation at the same time as lip closure. To acquire English /b/, the child must suppress the tendency to mispronounce it as a voiceless sound. However, Russian and German children don't have to suppress devoicing when the sound comes at the end of a word or syllable, so their language ends up with a final devoicing process. And that is why Russian and German adults tend to devoice final sounds when they learn English. As a person gets older, their ability to acquire fine details of muscular coordination degrades, especially after puberty. So learning English later in life makes it harder for Russian and German learners to pronounce final voiced sounds.

Generally speaking, all of phonology can be understood, if you understand this very fundamental fact about how pronunciation evolves in language learners. The suppression of mispronunciations is extremely important in acquiring a mature pronunciation of a language, and the ability to suppress mispronunciations degrades rapidly, especially after puberty, when the brain undergoes significant changes. One can then understand why typological patterns occur in the phonemic inventories of languages and why some sounds occur in most languages, but others do not.

 

[lpetrich]

Children's Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review | American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
I had to look in  International Phonetic Alphabet to see what's what in it.

The ability to make most phonemes is acquired very early in life, around 2 to 4 years, with some of them acquired as late as 6 or 7 years. The basic stops and nasals are acquired early, around 2 to 3 years of age. Fricatives /h/ /f/ /x/ (the kh fricative) are acquired a little later, and sibiliants /s/ /z/ /S/ (sh) and /Z/ (zh) and affricates /ts/ /dz/ /tS/ (ch) /dZ/ (English j) around 3 to 4, though some others are acquired very early. Fricatives /th/ /dh/ (English voiceless and voiced th) are acquired relatively late, at 4 to 5. Semivowels /j/ (English y) /w/ are acquired around 2 to 3, /l/ around 3 to 4, and /r/ (trilled r) around 4 to 5.

This early acquisition of language suggests that we have some adaptations for generating spoken language, adaptations that are absent from even the closest living species. The first attempts to teach human language to chimpanzees yielded "mama" "papa" "cup" "up" -- very phonemically limited. That's in part to the top of the windpipe (trachea) sticking well into the mouth. Human babies are born with that condition, but the top soon moves downward, allowing the tongue more freedom of motion, and also making it easier to choke.

The greatest success in teaching chimpanzees language has been with sign language, and they can learn a large number of individual signs. But the most they can do beyond that is 2-sign or 3-sign compounds, like watermelon "drink fruit" and radish "cry hurt food".


Also, every well-documented full-scale human society has language, with no known exceptions. I say "full-scale" to exclude societies of deaf people. Being unable to hear makes it difficult to generate spoken language.

 

[Copernicus]

I would say that the ability to pick up phonemes does not depend all that much on having the same general architecture in the oral cavity. Children born with severe defects learn to compensate. The skill that human children have in rapidly acquiring speech articulation is likely a genetic predisposition.

One thing to bear in mind is that one's ability to articulate sounds is severely limited only when attempting to produce speech. That is when native phonology constrains pronunciation, and it is the main reason why adult language learners have trouble acquiring sounds not native to their dominant language. So people attempting to "speak in tongues" (glossolalia) have a very limited range of sounds that they think of as "foreign". They don't tend to produce exotic sounds that we hear in genuine foreign language articulation. If one is trying to just make noises with the vocal tract, no such limitations apply. You can produce any sound that exists in a foreign language unhindered. It is just when you try to speak what you think of as words of a real language that the articulatory "programming" kicks in automatically.

 

[lpetrich]

Speaking the f and v sounds was enabled by eating soft foods | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

These are "labiodentals", made with one's upper teeth against one's lower lip. These sounds are enabled by having an overbite, a side effect of a diet of relatively soft foods, something made possible by relatively advanced cooking technology. Without such technology, our ancestors had more even bites, and more difficulty making labiodentals. Looking at the languages of recently low-tech peoples and looking at the protolanguages of those with more advanced technology, they are very short on labiodentals. So labiodentals were separately invented, and their presence doesn't indicate much about ancestry.


There are some other environmental influences on language features that I found out about recently. But for introduction, let us consider the concept of speech-sound sonority or perceived loudness. The most sonorous speech sound is "ah" and the least sonorous is voiceless stop consonants: p, t, k. I have found some sonority hierarchies:

•  Sonority hierarchy
• Sonority hierarchy - Glottopedia
• Linguismstics: /lɪŋˈgwɪzm̩stɪks/, Linguistics: Sonority Hierarchy

The sonority scales in the literature contradict each other in some details, though they agree in overall hierarchy.

• Vowels:
  • Low: a
  • Mid: e, o
  • High vowels: i, u
• Semivowels (glides): y, w
• Liquids:
  • Rhotic: r
  • Lateral: l
• Nasals: m, n, ng
• Fricatives
  • Voiced: z, zh, dh, v, gh
  • Voiceless: s, sh, th, f, kh
• Affricates
  • Voiced: dz, dzh
  • Voiceless: ts, tsh
• Stops or plosives
  • Voiced: b, d, g
  • Voiceless: p, t, k

There are broader categories, like:

• Approximants: semivowels + liquids
• Sonorants or resonants: vowels + semivowels + liquids + nasals
• Obstruents: fricatives + affricates + stops
• Continuants: vowels + semivowels + liquids + fricatives

This concept has broader value.  Sonority Sequencing Principle is for syllable structure. As a general rule, syllables have rising sonority then falling sonority. There are some exceptions, like initial /s/ + stop and final stop + /s/ in English.

 

[lpetrich]

I must mention here a rather curious ecological hypothesis for a certain type of speech sound. First some introduction about stop consonants in general. Stops have several possible voicings:

• Breathing just after the stop. Voicing variations:
  • Before the stop: voiced
  • Just after the stop: voiceless
  • A little after the stop: voiceless aspirated
• No breathing just after the stop: ejective or glottalic

Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives

Abstract:

We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. The patterns uncovered surface on all major world landmasses, and are not the result of the influence of particular language families. They reflect a significant and positive worldwide correlation between elevation and the likelihood that a language employs ejective phonemes. In addition to documenting this correlation in detail, we offer two plausible motivations for its existence. We suggest that ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity–a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air. These explications demonstrate how a reduction of ambient air density could promote the usage of ejective phonemes in a given language. Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

In short, the higher the altitude where one lives, the more likely one is to use ejective stops.

The authors note six regions that are both high in altitude and relatively flat. "These regions consist of (1) the North American cordillera, including the Rocky Mountains, Colorado plateau, and the Mexican altiplano, (2) the Andes and the Andean altiplano, (3) the southern African plateau, (4) the plateau of the east African rift and the Ethiopian highlands, (5) the Caucasus range and the associated Javakheti plateau, and (6) the massive Tibetan plateau and adjacent plateaus, most notably the Iranian plateau."

"We see as well that there are eight visual clusters of languages with ejectives, highlighted via white rectangles. Two of the largest of these are located within the North American cordillera. Another is located immediately to the east of the cordillera, on the associated Colorado plateau. A fourth cluster is located just southeast of Mexican altiplano. A fifth cluster is located on the southern African plateau. The sixth and seventh clusters are located along the East African rift, on two areas of the plateau associated with this rift. The eighth cluster is located in the region of the Caucasus mountains and the Javakheti Plateau. In addition, a glance at South America reveals that a number of the languages with ejectives on that landmass are located in the Andean cordillera or on the Andean altiplano in Bolivia, as Maddieson has noted."

A good fit.

"Remarkably, then, the clusters of languages with ejectives tend to be located on or very near five of the six major non-contiguous regions of high elevation on the earth’s inhabitable surface. The only major region of high elevation where languages with ejectives are absent is the large Tibetan plateau, along with adjacent regions of high altitude. It is not particularly surprising that one region should present such an exception, and in fact it strikes us as remarkable that only one region presents an exception."

"Conversely, some of the richest areas of the world linguistically, in terms of languages and linguistic stocks, are largely devoid of languages with ejectives. The areas in question are Oceania (including New Guinea and Australia), Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Amazonia."

All without large high-altitude areas.

"More generally, the languages with ejectives in high altitude zones represent myriad language stocks including Southern Khoisan, Central Khoisan, Caucasian, Athapaskan (Na-Dene), Semitic (Afro-Asiatic), Lezgic (Nakh-Daghestanian), Armenian, Aymaran, Hadza, Mayan, Salishan, Cahuapanan, Quechuan, Siouan, Cushitic (Afro-Asiatic), Nilo-Sharan, Oto-Manguean, and Eyak (Na-Dene)."

A very mixed bag.

So ejectives likely indicate living at high altitudes or else having recently done so, rather than shared ancestry.

 

[Swammerdami]

On the general topic of teeth configuration affecting one's voice ...

Speaking the f and v sounds was enabled by eating soft foods | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

These are "labiodentals", made with one's upper teeth against one's lower lip. These sounds are enabled by having an overbite, a side effect of a diet of relatively soft foods, something made possible by relatively advanced cooking technology. Without such technology, our ancestors had more even bites, and more difficulty making labiodentals.

... by coincidence my son mentioned to me just today that the famous singer Freddie Mercury has four extra teeth (mesiodens incisors). It seems he credits this configuration for his large singing range. (Top Google hits seem quite doubtful of this.)

 

[lpetrich]

 Sonority hierarchy has some ecological hypotheses directly connected to sonority, mentioning climate and vegetation cover.

Frontiers | Language Adapts to Environment: Sonority and Temperature | Communication

This study looks at brief samples of spoken material from 100 languages, dividing the speech into sonorous and obstruent time fractions. The percentage of sonorous material is the sonority score. This score correlates quite strongly with mean annual temperature in the area where the languages are spoken, with higher temperatures going together with higher sonority scores. The role of tree cover and annual precipitation, found to be important in earlier work, is not found to be significant in this data.

So it's sonorants vs. obstruents that they checked on, finding a greater fraction of sonorants in warmer climates.

The authors speculate that

This result may be explained if absorption and scattering are more important than reflection. Atmospheric absorption is greater at higher temperatures and peaks at higher frequencies with increasing temperature. Small-scale local perturbations (eddies) in the atmosphere created by high air temperatures also degrade the high-frequency spectral characteristics that are critical to distinguishing between obstruent consonants, leading to reduction in contrasts between them, and fewer clusters containing obstruent strings.

That hypothesis can be tested by considering long-distance propagation of sound. In arenas and stadiums, it does not get distorted very much, and it's only long-distance sound that sounds noticeably muffled, with much less high-frequency parts reaching our ears than low-frequency parts. That high-frequency parts were present in the original is evident from relatively close thunder, so it takes several kilometers of propagation before increased extinction of high-frequency sound becomes apparent.

Sonority and Climate in a World Sample of Languages: Findings and Prospects - John G. Fought, Robert L. Munroe, Carmen R. Fought, Erin M. Good, 2004

In a world sample (N = 60), the indigenous languages of tropical and subtropical climates in contrast to the languages spoken in temperate and cold zones manifested high levels of sonority. High sonority in phonetic segments, as found for example in vowels (versus consonants), increases the carrying power of speech sounds and, hence, audibility at a distance. We assume that in the course of daily activities, the speakers in warm/hot climates (a) are often outdoors due to equable ambient temperatures, (b) thereby frequently transmit messages distally, and (c) transmit such messages relatively intelligibly due to the acoustic and functional advantages of high sonority. Our conceptual model is similar to that of population biology, where there are well-known correlations between climate and somatic variables, and where it is assumed that communicative modalities and behaviors are selected or designed for success in specific habitats. We also take up possible alternative hypotheses and consider directions for future research.

I find that much more plausible than air attenuation, because sound follows the inverse-square law in addition to being absorbed or scattered as it travels.

 

[lpetrich]

Climate, Econiche, and Sexuality: Influences on Sonority in Language - EMBER - 2007 - American Anthropologist - Wiley Online Library
also at
untitled - Climate_Econiche_and_Sexuality_Influence.pdf

Previous cross-cultural research by Robert Munroe and colleagues has linked two features of language to warm climates—a higher proportion of consonant-vowel syllables and a higher proportion of sonorous (more audible) sounds. The underlying theory is that people in warmer climates communicate at a distance more often than people in colder climates, and it is adaptive to use syllables and sounds that are more easily heard and recognized at a distance. However, there is considerable variability in warm as opposed to cold climates, which needs to be explained. In the present research report, we show that additional factors increase the predictability of sonority. We find that more specific features of the environment—such as type of plant cover and degree of mountainous terrain—help to predict sonority. And, consistent with previous research on folk-song style, measures of sexual restrictiveness also predict low sonority.

Vegetation density is negatively correlated with sonority in warm climates but positively in cold climates. Being more sexually restrictive is also negatively correlated with sonority.

The fraction of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables varies among languages, with some having that as the only allowed kind with consonants and with others allowing consonant clusters at both ends.

Like sonority, CV fraction is also larger in warm climates, and it is also negatively correlated with sexual restrictiveness. But it had only a weak correlation with vegetation density. CV fraction has a positive correlation with holding of babies, and a negative correlation with literacy.

 

[lpetrich]

Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots
Considers how languages with "complex tone" are distributed, those with at least three phonemic tones, tones that distinguish words. Chinese is the best-known tonal language. Compares that to "simple tone", with two phonemic tones, and no phonetic tone.

No tone was the most common in low-humidity areas, and complex tone was the most common in high-humidity areas, like sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. It is rare in the Americas, mainly found in southern North America and in the Amazon basin.

Languages in Drier Climates Use Fewer Vowels
Finding the "vowel index", the fraction of sounds that are vowels. The authors used absolute humidity, not relative humidity, and cold climates were thus coded as low-humidity ones. Climate as a separate variable would have been interesting.

There was a correlation, but not a very big one. By languages, the line goes from (humidity - vowel index) (0, 0.39) to (0.02, 0.49) with a scatter of 0.1. By language families, it's (0, 0.38) to (0.02, 0.51) with a scatter of 0.05 - 0.1.

 

[Politesse]

Alright, repeat after me, class:

"CORRELATION..."

"...DOES NOT PROVE CAUSATION!"

"I CRAFTED AN UNFALSIAFIABLE 'THEORY' TO EXPLAIN THE DATA SET I ALREADY POSSESSED..."

"...AND IT WAS JUST SO!"

 

[lpetrich]

I agree that one has to be careful about the direction of causation.

As to what may cause the correlations that I'd mentioned earlier, in a warm climate, thick vegetation may muffle sound going through it, and otherwise make it difficult to do long-range interaction, while in a cold climate, relatively thick vegetation means being warm enough to allow it to grow, and thus warm enough to enable being talkative outdoors. The authors coded by number of cold months, without precisely defining "cold". Below freezing? Halfway between room temperature (20 C) and freezing? (10 C)

As to literacy being inversely correlated with sonority, it seems like a side effect of what places have the most advanced economic development: temperate climates. David Landes's book "The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations" proposes that before electrically-powered air conditioning, tropical and subtropical climates were too hot for doing a lot of work, and as a result, a midday siesta is a time-honored custom in some such places.

So with sonority and literacy, they have a shared cause, climate, rather than one causing the other.

 

[lpetrich]

In dry climates, one may want to avoid losing water in one's breath, and that may account for greater fractions of consonants.

Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited
Abstract:

The claim that Eskimo languages have words for different types of snow is well-known among the public, but has been greatly exaggerated through popularization and is therefore viewed with skepticism by many scholars of language. Despite the prominence of this claim, to our knowledge the line of reasoning behind it has not been tested broadly across languages. Here, we note that this reasoning is a special case of the more general view that language is shaped by the need for efficient communication, and we empirically test a variant of it against multiple sources of data, including library reference works, Twitter, and large digital collections of linguistic and meteorological data. Consistent with the hypothesis of efficient communication, we find that languages that use the same linguistic form for snow and ice tend to be spoken in warmer climates, and that this association appears to be mediated by lower communicative need to talk about snow and ice. Our results confirm that variation in semantic categories across languages may be traceable in part to local communicative needs. They suggest moreover that despite its awkward history, the topic of “words for snow” may play a useful role as an accessible instance of the principle that language supports efficient communication.

Franz Boas observed that certain Eskimo languages have unrelated forms for subtypes of snow (e.g. aput: snow on the ground, qana: falling snow), and thus subdivide the notion of snow more finely than English does

Many of the Inuit languages' words for snow are words for different kinds of snow, and many of them are derived from only a few roots, like the ones mentioned here. They are thus comparable to the compound words for kinds of snow that English has: snowpack, snowdrift, snowstorm, ...

The authors then address some alternative causes.

For example, it is known that complexity of the lexicon in several semantic domains correlates with societal complexity [27], and societal complexity tends to be lower in regions near the equator [28]. Thus, languages spoken in warm regions might tend to have fewer and broader semantic categories generally, not just for ice and snow. Moreover, the link between temperature and ice/snow might be only rather weakly significant relative to other comparable links in the same dataset.

So they checked a lot of words for closely related concepts, and they found only two that were greater than ice/snow: man/male-animal and air/wind.

As to how much snow and ice are mentioned, they looked at statistics -- the lower the average temperature the more the mentions.

As it happens, a recent study has argued that Boas’ original claim was in fact correct. Krupnik and Müller-Wille [5] have argued, contra Pullum, and on the basis of several empirical datasets, that “the English vocabulary for snow and related phenomena is clearly inferior to those recorded in several Eskimo/Inuit languages and dialects” (p. 391). They argue further that this phenomenon is not limited to Eskimo/Inuit languages, but also extends to other languages spoken in cold climates where snow is common, such as Russian. They illustrate this point with several Russian lexemes, including one that interestingly captures the absence of snow where it might be expected: “protalina (open ground where the snow has melted)” (p. 394). Finally, they suggest that the entire debate has been somewhat empirically misdirected, in that Eskimo languages tend to exhibit a richer vocabulary for types of sea ice than for types of snow—and that a truly rich snow vocabulary may be found elsewhere, among the Norwegian Sámi.

I recall in another forum someone listing several compound words for kinds of snow in Swedish, and English has a sizable snow vocabulary.

 

[lpetrich]

As to snow and ice not being well-distinguished in some languages, there are some that had no words for either until recent centuries. John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If I myself see a man walk on the ice, it is past probability; it is knowledge. But if another tells me he saw a man in England, in the midst of a sharp winter, walk upon water hardened with cold, this has so great conformity with what is usually observed to happen that I am disposed by the nature of the thing itself to assent to it; unless some manifest suspicion attend the relation of that matter of fact. But if the same thing be told to one born between the tropics, who never saw nor heard of any such thing before, there the whole probability relies on testimony: and as the relators are more in number, and of more credit, and have no interest to speak contrary to the truth, so that matter of fact is like to find more or less belief. Though to a man whose experience has always been quite contrary, and who has never heard of anything like it, the most untainted credit of a witness will scarce be able to find belief.

The king of Siam. As it happened to a Dutch ambassador, who entertaining the king of Siam with the particularities of Holland, which he was inquisitive after, amongst other things told him that the water in his country would sometimes, in cold weather, be so hard that men walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant, if he were there. To which the king replied, Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lie.

An interesting issue about snow vs. ice is whether or not the words are related, like "dust ice" vs. "rock ice". English "ice" and "snow" don't look related, and looking at etymologies in wiktionary.org reveals that they are not. That was true in most other languages and language families that I looked at in detail, like Germanic, Latin/Romance, Slavic, and Greek and their superfamily Indo-European, also Uralic, Turkic, Mongolian, Japanese, Chinese, Eskimo, and Semitic.

Tibetan may be an exception, with gangs "snow" and 'khyags pa "ice".

For the Semitic languages, words for snow come from Proto-Semitc *talq-, while Hebrew, Aramic, and Arabic words for ice look like they were borrowed from Latin gelidus "icy".

Wiktionary has some entries for some Eskimo/Inuit languages: Greenlandic and Inuktitut. For Greenlandic, aput "snow (on the ground)", siku "ice (on water)", sermeq "ice (on ground)". For Inuktitut, aput "snow (in general)", mauja "deep soft snow", siku "ice".

I looked in snow - Wiktionary and ice/translations - Wiktionary

 

[lpetrich]

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics
Using data from "polysemy", words having multiple meanings distinguished by context. Which sets of multiple meanings do words tend to have?

For example, English "moon" and "month". They and their Germanic cognates are from Proto-Germanic *mênô and *mênôths, in turn from PIE, with *mêh1ns for both words. Many other languages have the same word for the celestial body and the period of time.

The authors found a sematic network of concept related by polysemies, having the same word in some languages. Some of the strongest relationships:

• Moon - month
• Sun - day/daytime
• sky - heaven
• wind - air
• earth/soil - ground, country
• earth/soil - dust - ash(es)
• smoke - mist
• stone - mountain - hill
• water - liquid
• river - stream
• lake - pond

They state their results in their "Significance" section:

Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to an underlying level of conceptual structure. To what degree this conceptual structure is universal or is due to properties of cultural histories, or to the environment inhabited by a speech community, is still controversial. Meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize, for quantitative comparative studies. Using cross-linguistic dictionaries across languages carefully selected as an unbiased sample reflecting the diversity of human languages, we provide an empirical measure of semantic relatedness between concepts. Our analysis uncovers a universal structure underlying the sampled vocabulary across language groups independent of their phylogenetic relations, their speakers’ culture, and geographic environment.

 

[lpetrich]

Larger communities create more systematic languages

Research over the past decade has suggested that linguistic diversity may result from differences in the social environments in which languages evolve. Specifically, recent work found that languages spoken in larger communities typically have more systematic grammatical structures. However, in the real world, community size is confounded with other social factors such as network structure and the number of second languages learners in the community, and it is often assumed that linguistic simplification is driven by these factors instead.

Testing that result by having people invent languages for communicating with each other. Their procedure:

Participants were asked to create a fantasy language and use it in order to communicate about different novel scenes. Participants were not allowed to communicate in any other way besides typing, and their letter inventory was restricted: it included a hyphen, five vowel characters (a,e,i,o,u) and 10 consonants (w,t,p,s,f,g,h,k,n,m), which participants could combine freely.

The experiment had 16 rounds, comprising three phases: group naming (round 0), communication (rounds 1–7; rounds 9–15) and test (round 8; round 16).

Then going into a lot of further detail.

They find, from the abstract:

Here, we show that in contrast to previous assumptions, community size has a unique and important influence on linguistic structure. We experimentally examine the live formation of new languages created in the laboratory by small and larger groups, and find that larger groups of interacting participants develop more systematic languages over time, and do so faster and more consistently than small groups. Small groups also vary more in their linguistic behaviours, suggesting that small communities are more vulnerable to drift. These results show that community size predicts patterns of language diversity, and suggest that an increase in community size might have contributed to language evolution.

 

[lpetrich]

Types of inflection: what grammatical information is present in each word.

• Analytic: small number of info bits per word
• Synthetic: large number of info bits per word

These categories may be divided further:

• Isolating: one info bit per word
• Agglutinative: several info bits per word, but the word can be divided into parts (morphemes) with one bit each
• Fusional: words or morphemes have more than one bit, but cannot be analyzed further.

Agglutinative inflection differs from isolating inflection in what is counted as separate words. Agglutinative inflection can be taken to an extreme, as in polysynthetic inflection, where a word can be a full-scale sentence.

Many languages only partially fit these categories, being some of each.

For example, English is largely isolating, but it also has some agglutinative and fusional features. Consider verbs' simple past tenses and past/passive participles. The regular conjugation is of "weak verbs", having -ed, pronounced /-d/, /-t/, /-id/ depending on the verb root. That is agglutiative, even if on a low level. Irregular verbs are mostly "strong verbs", with vowel shifts and past/passive participles often ending in -n (give-gave-given, see-saw-seen, come-came-come, break-broke-broken, ...), though there are some irregular weak verbs, with irregular versions of the regular conjugation, like "had" for "have".

BTW, these two types of verbs have parallels in other Germanic languages, enough for both of them to be reconstructed for Proto-Germanic.

As to what can be put in an inflection, quite a lot. Nouns can be inflected for number, definiteness, noun case, and possessor, and verbs can be inflected for tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation, evidentiality, subject, and object.


Having mentioned how agglutinative inflection can come from isolating inflection by running together words, I mention that fusional inflection can come from isolating or agglutinative inflection by doing contractions.

This is the origin of Romance-language preposition-article combinations, and some of them are difficult to analyze, like French du < de le and des < de les. BTW, if one wants to do historical linguistics, I recommend starting with Latin and the Romance languages. A long written history, good documentation, lots of work on it, you name it.


Some people have proposed a cycle: isolating -> agglutinative -> fusional -> isolating again, but that seems too schematic.

As to which is easiest to learn, isolating and agglutinating morphologies are roughly equivalent, because they are both very modular, both easy to decompose into parts. Fusional morphology is more difficult, since it is less modular.