Languages differ along multiple dimensions (lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax). Related languages descend from a common ancestor language but have diverged over time. This paper asks whether... Show moreLanguages differ along multiple dimensions (lexis, phonology, morphology, syntax). Related languages descend from a common ancestor language but have diverged over time. This paper asks whether languages diverge equally along all dimensions, and, to the extent that they do not, which dimension reflects the traditional language family tree best. We computed measures of (i) lexical distance (ii) phonetic distance, and (iii) syntactic distance. The measures were computed on all words and sentences extracted from a corpus of translations of four relatively short English texts into another four Germanic languages (Danish, Dutch, German, Swedish), five Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish) and six Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Slovenian). We examined the correlation structure of the distances for all pairs of Germanic (10), Romance (10) and Slavic (15) languages (i.e., within-family comparisons only). The results indicate that the linguistic dimensions are generally correlated (weakly but significantly), and that the correlations are stronger for pairs within families than when all 35 pairs are examined together. Cladistic family trees correlate best with the lexical distance (0.851 < r < 0.887). This confirms that the genealogical language trees are predominantly based on lexical rather than phonetic or syntactic considerations. Show less
Liu, H.; Liang, J.; Heuven, V.J.J.P. van; Heeringa, W. 2020
The aim of the present perceptual study is to weight tones and vowels as acoustic cues in Chinese subregional dialect identification, and to test the credibility of the subregional dialect... Show moreThe aim of the present perceptual study is to weight tones and vowels as acoustic cues in Chinese subregional dialect identification, and to test the credibility of the subregional dialect classification that has been proposed in the literature. Our findings show that listeners are able to pinpoint speakers’ subregional dialect even when only given monosyllabic Chinese word stimuli, either natural or tone-transplanted. The results agree with the impres- sionistic claim that both vowels and tones contribute to perceptual subregional dialect identification. However, vowel quality differences make a greater contribution than the tone differences –which contradicts the order of importance predicted in the impressionistic literature. Strong interactions between vowels and tones are also found. Show less
