Environmental effects on language change
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Frazz for 7/8/2024 and 7/9/2024:
There's a long history of research (and a longer history of speculation) about the linguistic effects of temperature, altitude, genes, and other language-external factors. I dimly recall a lecturer (I think seriously?) suggesting that Grimm's Law was caused by the discovery of beer, although I haven't been able to find any traces of this in the literature, even as a joke.
A good review of the (non-alcoholic) topic can be found in Ladd, Roberts, and Dediu, "Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics", Annual Review of Linguistics 2015.
In response to an earlier paper about geographical correlations between genes and tones, I wrote:
Just to underline one aspect of this discussion, I did a trivial little simulation, in which individual mutations were placed at random on a 20×20 grid, and then died, reproduced and migrated at random for 35 generations. (The grid was configured as a manifold, so that if you migrate off of one side, you come back in on the opposite one.) I ran 100 traits independently, and then looked at the geographical correlations among their population frequencies:
The point was just that many of the correlations in that simulation are "statistically significant", but (by construction) the causal factors are not influences of the (imaginary) geography or the intrinsic biology of the (imaginary) people, but just the effects of assuming that languages change locally and the groups of people who speak them migrate and interact.
Which doesn't mean that geographical and biological differences don't have linguistic effects, just that (even strong) correlations are not enough to establish them.
Ross Presser said,
July 12, 2024 @ 1:44 pm
Was it this article?
https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/107526
> Students of the history of the English language (a course commonly referred to as HEL, or more euphemistically, ‘h-e-single hockey stick’) routinely plod through Grimm’s Law, a tortuous series of sound changes that occurred in the Germanic languages as their speakers chewed sausage, swilled beer, and watched their words drifting farther and farther from their Proto-Indo-European roots during prehistoric Northern Europe's long, winter nights. Because of Rome's sunny Mediterranean climate and a Roman diet rich in red wine and pasta, Latin was not affected by Grimm’s law, and so its words preserve the sounds of the lighter, Indo-European originals.
Mathieu L Bouchard said,
July 12, 2024 @ 2:42 pm
The use of "manifold" here doesn't fit the definition used in math. In a manifold, wrap-around coordinates are allowed, but not required, and integer coordinates aren't allowed, so a 20×20 grid isn't a manifold, whereas the regular 2-D or 3-D infinite space is a manifold. A wrap-around 2-D manifold can be "sampled" by using a grid of points on it, but the grid itself isn't a manifold.
Apparently, computer graphics sometimes uses the word "manifold" differently, to mean a polyhedron representing a "closed surface". You could think of the cells of your grid as mapping to the faces of a torus-shaped manifold, but most manifolds (polyhedra) aren't torus-shaped.
I usually say something like "wrap-around coordinates" to mean what you mean. I don't recall a standard term, apart from calling it modulo arithmetic in multiple dimensions…
David Marjanović said,
July 12, 2024 @ 3:15 pm
Tortuous? That's one of the simple and straightforward ones!
Mark Liberman said,
July 12, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
@Mathieu L Bouchard: "The use of "manifold" here doesn't fit the definition used in math."
Thanks for the correction — I was apparently guilty of an analogical or metaphorical extension of the concept.
It seems odd that there wouldn't be a term for discrete point sets with n-dimensional adjacency defined in various quasi-topological ways, but maybe such things are just not mathematically interesting.
SP said,
July 13, 2024 @ 1:45 am
In statistical physics, that would be called a square lattice with periodic boundary conditions. Some people might say the problem is defined on a torus, referring to the topology.
Gokul Madhavan said,
July 13, 2024 @ 10:38 am
I’ve been fascinated by the connection between language and weather since my freshman year of college. My friend and I, both native Tamil speakers, would struggle to articulate Tamil words when going on night-time strolls in the frigid Boston winter. At the same time, I was also studying Russian, and even though it was still quite foreign to me, its sounds just felt a lot more comfortable to articulate even through frozen lips.
@SP: I was also thinking of a toroidal topology here.
Rodger C said,
July 13, 2024 @ 11:44 am
Tortuous? That's one of the simple and straightforward ones!
By "tortuous" he must have meant "guttural."
Rodger C said,
July 13, 2024 @ 11:52 am
Speaking of Tamil, I was just rereading the article "Tamils" in my 1960 Britannica, in which one Reinhold Rost complains that the alphabet is "utterly inadequate for the proper expression of the consonants" because it doesn't indicate manner of articulation like the North Indian alphabets. I check online, and sure enough, these distinctions aren't phonemic in Tamil.
Gokul Madhavan said,
July 14, 2024 @ 10:20 am
@Rodger C: Indeed, there was a discussion on the Tamil writing system just a few weeks ago on this very blog.
For my part, I would say that the Tamil writing system currently in use is hyper-optimized for the phonemics of formal, literary Tamil. It is quite challenging to represent even contemporary colloquial Tamil, let alone all the many borrowed lexical items from other languages with quite different phonemic and phonotactic properties.
Philip Taylor said,
July 15, 2024 @ 11:19 am
Rodger/Gokul, I could not find anything analogous to Reinhold Rost’s statement in my 15th edition (1987) — the Macropædia has no entry for Tamil, and the Micropædia has a two-paragraph section on the Tamil language but nothing (as far as I can see) to that effect …
Philip Taylor said,
July 15, 2024 @ 11:23 am
Sorry, for "rii·outh" please read "mouth" and for "Briihmi" please read "Brāhmī" — copy-and-paste errors from OCR'd PDF …