tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post2450449153448979670..comments2024-01-04T04:11:55.717+02:00Comments on Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Darwinian linguistic controversiesDienekeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02082684850093948970noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-58315592079903482652011-11-11T16:38:19.609+02:002011-11-11T16:38:19.609+02:00Florian Jaeger has his lab's critique of Atkin...Florian Jaeger has his lab's critique of Atkinson (to appear in Linguistic Typology) available on his website: http://hlplab.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/glmm-for-typologists/.<br /><br />In any case, the fact that there are 140 language families in the Americas, 80 in Papua New Guinea vs. some 20 in Africa suggests that if there's a pattern of variation in phonological inventories that has a phylogenetic significance it should show a gradient of decreasing diversity into Africa and not out of Africa. If individual African languages carry more phonemes than languages outside of Africa, this by itself means just as much for phylogeny as the fact that there are more languages classified as Niger-Congo than as any other language family. All of them, no matter how many, go back to proto-Niger-Congo, which is likely of Neolithic origin, which brought about a demographic outburst and population expansion with corresponding proliferation of individual, closely related languages.German Dziebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10703679732205862495noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7785493.post-11715422800692421312011-11-05T11:55:06.323+02:002011-11-05T11:55:06.323+02:00Dienekes,
The forthcoming issue of Linguistic Ty...Dienekes, <br /><br />The forthcoming issue of Linguistic Typology has about 10 critical papers of both Atkinson 2011 and Dunn et al. 2011 (the latter of which I'm an author). Michael Cysouw's comment will be in there. <br /><br />SimonAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com