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"highest total phoneme diversity"

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Assuming "highest diversity" is supposed to mean "largest inventory", this claim is obvious nonsense. To support such a claim, we'd at least need to see the actual inventory, not just a letter from someone who may simply not be familiar with the languages which would belie the claim. In this case, it's just a letter, with no evidence provided. — kwami (talk) 04:31, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What are you talking about? The article is published in the peer-reviewed "technical comment" section of Science. It's not a letter. And if you had read to the end of the article, you would have found the link to the supporting evidence. Here's the link for your convenience.
Science also published Quentin Atkinson's response to the technical comment, and he does not dispute the findings that are relevant here. -Zanhe (talk) 06:21, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, the source doesn't even say that. All it says is that Dônđäc has the largest number of vowel qualities of the 500 languages in WALS, and ranks highest is a combined measure which they do not define. — kwami (talk) 04:36, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

What? The source was criticizing WALS for its oversimplification. WALS was used by Quentin Atkinson in his original paper that the source was criticizing. The source used its own evidence, see link above.
Also, why did you add a dead link to the article? Do you think a dead link is a more reliable source than Science? I googled the term Dônđäc on http://comonca.org.cn, the site that the dead link was hosted on, and only found one result, which is an exact copy of the Science article. -Zanhe (talk) 06:21, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, they buttress their point by double counting tones in Asian languages: they count them once for open syllables, then again for closed syllables, whereas for African languages they only count them once. That's not a valid comparison. (SE Asia does have more complex tone systems than most of Africa, but not more than Liberia.) It looks like they've also abandoned any attempt at getting a representative sample.
They don't know these languages. They're repeating what others have said. (As would be expected for such a collection of languages: WALS does the same.) For Dondac they give 20 vowels, 8 tones, and 41 consonants. It's unfortunate that the link above is dead; it demonstrates that these are 20 allophones, not separate vowels. (There's been a discussion of this elsewhere.) We also know that the number of tones is exaggerated for Chinese languages. It's especially problematic for Wu, where tone depends on the voicing of the consonants. As for the consonants, since they don't list their sources, it's not possible to verify. — kwami (talk) 18:13, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Recovered the link. The consonants appear to be valid. I'll review it this evening when I have more time. — kwami (talk) 19:25, 18 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I'm glad that you've recovered the link, it looks like a useful source. However, the source you found corroborates the Science article instead of rebutting it as you claim. It clearly says the dialect has 20 vowels and lists all of them. Where did you get the idea that these are 20 allophones, and where in the source does it say it has "10 normal vowels"? -Zanhe (talk) 15:28, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes 20 vowels: 12 in open syllables, and 9 in closed syllables. But when we count the number of vowels in a language, we're interested in the number of phonemes, not the number of allophones. (Also, because /ɨ/ and /ɚ/ occur in restricted environments, they are a bit different than the other vowels, which occur more freely—though interestingly /u/ does not have the variation of /i/). Lots of languages have different vowel qualities in open and closed syllables, but we don't count them as separate phonemes. Look how our primary source arranges the allophones in 11 columns. Each column corresponds to a phoneme.
It's the same thing with tone: Kam has 15 "tones", but they are 9 in open syllables and 6 in checked syllables, so only 9 tonemes. You wouldn't say Kam has more tones than a Kru language with 9 tones that only has open syllables. — kwami (talk) 20:51, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The source you added says 20 vowels, period. Where in the source does it say anything about allophones? Please stop your original research. -Zanhe (talk) 21:13, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've reverted you again. You have no source that Jinhui has the largest vowel inventory in the world. — kwami (talk) 20:52, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There is. And it's published in the journal Science and included in the article. You keep saying it's nonsense. But I find your attitude nonsensical and extremely rude. It doesn't matter what you think unless you find a reliable source to prove it. -Zanhe (talk) 21:13, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As for the Baiyue comment that got caught up in the revert, that's a claim made for all southern Chinese languages, not just for Jinhui. — kwami (talk) 21:03, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
According to Ladefoged, American English has 26 vowels in stressed syllables, and additional vowels in unstressed syllables. British English has even more. Either would be more than Jinhui. And that is, of course, because he's illustrating allophones, and the number of allophones is only limited by how precise you want to be. If we're going to count allophones for Jinhui, we can only compare it to other languages for which we're counting allophones. — kwami (talk) 21:27, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Kwami is absolutely right. We don't typically count allophonic variation when dealing with relative size of vowel or consonant inventories. This is clearly a case of counting allophones and not phonemes. And if we're going to start dealing with allophonic variation, then 20 is nothing in the world's allophonic inventories. The second problem with the absolutist statement which I've reverted is that it is not the "most in the world", it is the most in that particular data base. There are 5-7 thousand languages in the world and the WALS database doesn't even represent 20% of that number. Therefore you cannot make any such statement that X is the most in the world since there is no data base that includes all the languages and speech varieties in the world. Comments in Science are simply not as reliable as comments in linguistic sources. The willingness, for example, of Scientific American to print Greenberg's mass comparison monstrosity illustrates that popular magazines are simply unreliable when it comes to sourcing linguistic articles. And the source which is being cited in support of that "largest in the world" doesn't say that at all. It says that it is the largest in their data base of 500-something languages. So to make the statement that it is the largest in the world is completely unsourced. It also seems quite clear that the authors don't understand the difference between allophonic variation and phonemic variation since they talk about WALS' inventories in terms of "levels", whatever that means to them. The clear non-linguistic terminology and methodology that they adopt makes the authors' linguistic credentials suspect. --Taivo (talk) 21:35, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Do you guys even understand what the source says? Since Kwami added the Chinese language source, I assumed he understood Chinese, but apparently he doesn't. The source explicitly says "这种差异具有辨音意义。所以金汇方言的单元音有 20 个之多" Translation: "These differences (between checked and non-checked vowels) are meaningful in distinguishing phonemes. Therefore Jinhui dialect has as many as 20 monophthongs." The 20 vowels are different phonemes, not allophones.
Yes, we can say that they argue that these are phonemes. I suppose the glottal stop is just phonetic detail? It is a bizarre claim, though, and they don't give any evidence for their analysis, they simply assert that [Vʔ] counts as a separate vowel from [V], which we don't see people claiming for other languages. After all, someone could claim that the difference between bead and beat lies in the vowel, not in the final consonant, and that /iː/ and /i/ are therefore separate phonemes in English, pushing the number higher than that of Jinhui. (Also, they make whacko claims like speakers of Jinhui can think faster than other people because they have a larger number of short syllables, which damages their credibility.) — kwami (talk) 22:31, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
On your second point, it found it ridiculous that you'd compare Science with Scientific American. Scientific American is a popular science magazine for amateurs, while Science is one of the most respected academic journals in the world. -Zanhe (talk) 22:04, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Except that Science publishes a lot of nonsense when it comes to linguistics. But more to the point, you have not shown where it supports your claims. — kwami (talk) 22:31, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Science is not "one of the most respected academic journals in the world". As Kwami says, it publishes a lot of linguistic nonsense. --Taivo (talk) 03:24, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Frankly, I don't know why they don't count nasal vowels. 11 oral vowels plus 7 nasal would be 18, still one of the largest inventories in the world. Perhaps they vary allophonically with a nasal coda, as in some related varieties? And it looks like they're analyzing the rhotic vowel as a coda as well. Such decisions make a huge difference in which language is "most". — kwami (talk) 21:55, 24 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Zanhe, are you going off of Chinese newspaper reports, like this one? I see that they do make the claim that Jinhui has the largest number of vowels in the world, but as far as I see, the Science article does not make that claim. — kwami (talk) 03:15, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The article in Science makes no claim that Jinhui has "the most". It simply lists Jinhui as having the largest number of vowel allophones in their limited data base. That is an entirely different claim than saying that it has the "most in the world". --Taivo (talk) 03:23, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The more I look at the Chinese article, the more I think the authors didn't know what they were talking about. No author is listed (because it's just part of one chapter). I wonder if they didn't copy from the actual researchers without knowing what they were copying. Like people who claim that English has five vowels (a e i o u), it looks like they took the IPA transcription and counted the IPA letters as "vowels".
If they were to count basic nasal vowels, as we do in French, they'd have 18, which is a very respectable figure. But we can't do that ourselves, because for all we know nasal vowels are allophonic with coda [ŋ], as in related varieties.
The link has been updated. When we originally quoted them (long before the Science article or coverage in Chinese newspapers), they listed a rather different set of vowels.
Traill lists 26 short vowels for East ǃXoon, not counting nasal vowels, which are always long. DoBeS lists 20 for West !Xoon. Juǀʼhoansi has 30 vowels, depending on how you count them. Nǁng has 22, by one count at least. Ekoka !Kung 21. Naro at least 25. Sedang has 24 monophthongs, and that's not even the largest count for the Bahnaric languages. — kwami (talk) 03:39, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Even the wording of the Science articles makes me suspicious of the linguistic qualifications of the authors or the accuracy of the data they were citing. --Taivo (talk) 04:04, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've found another source, the County annals of Fengxian (奉贤县志), which documents these vowels (without any phonation) in the old Fengxian dialect: [ɨ i u y ɑ ɔ o e ɛ ø ɯ ɐ ʊ æ œ ʌ ɪ], and syllabic [(ə)l m ŋ], on this page online. [a] may be an allophone of [ɑ]. The 2/3 vowels [ɑ ɛ (ɐ)] exist in both pure and nasal form, and nasal [ɐ] may be an allophone of [ɐŋ]. But wait... The annals states that, "本县西乡音以南桥镇为代表，东乡音以奉城镇为代表。南桥音系可为本县方言的代表音" which suggests that the phonology mentioned in the annals apply to the Nanqiao dialect (Note: there are several town names in China which are all romanized as "Nanqiao": the one mentioned here is in Shanghai), which is considered the standard dialect in Fengxian, and not, however, the Jinhui dialect. I don't know if the phonology of the two dialects are highly similar. —Iewcet (talk) 11:47, 20 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

ANI discussion

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There is an ANI discussion which concerns this article. See WP:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive844#Kwamikagami edit-warring at Gaulish language. -Zanhe (talk) 21:40, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Mandarin has 2 vowels?

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This is an extremely non-standard interpretation obtained by interpreting /i/ /u/ /y/ as glides with no vowel nucleus and calling any vowel with complementary distribution an allophone (even if there are common minimal pairs with other vowels). If one takes a maximally permissive approach Mandarin can have 18 vowels. I will update the Mandarin talk page. 202.94.70.52 (talk) 07:30, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. I just changed it into something less egregious. But honestly... I don’t think a comparison to Standard Mandarin is called for in the first place. Someone took the effort to source it so I didn’t want to delete it altogether, but it’s a lil’ but sensationalistic 2A02:A450:A88E:1:8D9E:9660:6D6F:C06 (talk) 22:02, 4 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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