Does climate affect language?

A linguist has found that tone languages appear in regions of high humidity. But the idea that human speech adapts to the environment is not a popular one. So what’s going on?

Daniel Midgley speaks with the author Caleb Everett on this episode of Talk the Talk.


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198: The Geography of Sound (featuring Caleb Everett)

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Show notes

App That Aims To Make Books ‘Squeaky Clean’ Draws Ire From Edited Writers
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/03/27/395788461/app-that-aims-to-make-books-squeaky-clean-draws-ire-from-edited-writers

Authors: end to censored versions of books is ‘victory for the world of dirt’
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/27/clean-reader-books-app-censorship-victory-authors-celebrate

Clean Reader: The app that censors rude words from ebooks
http://www.cnet.com/news/clean-reader-the-app-that-censors-rude-words-from-ebooks/

Jennifer Porter: “My Clean Reader App Experience” Hilarious!
http://www.romancenovelnews.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1167:my-clean-reader-app-experience&Itemid=53

Some languages don’t have syllables: Larry Hyman on the universality of the syllable
http://dlc.hypotheses.org/263

The idea of syllables doesn’t work with some Native American languages
The Languages of Native North AmericaSalish Languages and Linguistics: Theoretical and Descriptive Perspectives

Linguists didn’t accept Everett’s first attempt on this theme. See “Ejectives, High Altitudes, and Grandiose Linguistic Hypotheses”
http://languagesoftheworld.info/geolinguistics/ejectives-high-altitudes-grandiose-linguistic-hypotheses.html

Everett pressed the point: “A return to ejectives at high altitude”
http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:_Xu2id2MHQ0J:scholar.google.com/&hl=en&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5

Long article with lots of background: “Correlational Studies in Typological and Historical Linguistics”
http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:2071367:4/component/escidoc:2071365/Ladd_roberts_dediu.pdf

Everett’s new paper: “Climate, vocal folds, and tonal languages: Connecting the physiological and geographic dots”
http://m.pnas.org/content/112/5/1322.abstract

Everett talks about the paper
http://serious-science.org/news/2152

Post in Replicated Typo: “Tone and Humidity”
http://www.replicatedtypo.com/tone-and-humidity/10207.html

Other linguists aren’t convinced. Here’s the interview with Ben Zimmer and Geoffrey Nunberg.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/10/language-words

You can look at the data for tone in the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures. Lots of other data, too.
http://wals.info/feature/13A#1/6/142

Sweden will make a gender-neutral pronoun official by adding it to the dictionary
http://qz.com/369725/sweden-will-make-a-gender-neutral-pronoun-official-by-adding-it-to-the-dictionary/

Epenthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epenthesis

About every dictionary in the world has ‘whale’ as one syllable.
Hey, look, Em: it’s even got “hwayl”.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/whale

The ‘prayer hands’ emoji changed in the latest iPhone update and people are freaking out
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-prayer-hands-emoji-is-changing-2015-3

Emojipedia: Person With Folded Hands
http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-hands/

Gawker: No, the Praying Hands Emoji Is Not a “High Five”
http://gawker.com/no-the-praying-hands-emoji-is-not-a-high-five-1613936693


Image credit: http://www.replicatedtypo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-01-14-at-17.27.53.png