Everett et al. (2015) find a that complex tonal languages tend to be found in humid environments a correlation that holds up within different families and parts of the world. Despite the impressive statistical and experimental support for this causal claim, evidence is needed from natural language use, such as Chinese speakers changing their use of tone depending on humidity, before the claim can be considered well supported. There is otherwise a risk that this correlation could be an artifact of history of language families and language contact. To illustrate this, I show in a series of simulations that random selection of languages followed by language contact can create a positive global correlation between tone and humidity with as much as a 83 per cent probability, and a 47 per cent probability of holding within at least two different macro-areas. Language contact is additionally responsible for these correlations holding up when controlling for language relatedness, as I show that when using the random independent samples test employed by Everett et al., their result is still expected by chance as much as 60 per cent to 80 per cent of the time. I further show how contact can create correlations within families by a phylogenetic analysis of the evolution of tone in Niger-Congo and Sino-Tibetan. The number of tones that languages use correlates with humidity within five different global areas (Africa, Eurasia, South America, North America, and the Pacific), and within four different language families (Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, Afro-Asiatic, and Niger-Congo). This is better statistical support than even for word order universals, which despite having some support when sampling from different macro-areas (Dryer 1992) do not seem to hold consistently within large language families (Dunn et al. 2011). In addition, the experimental evidence that they cite showing that dry air has …

中文翻译：

---

评论：语言接触在建立湿度和语气之间的相关性方面的作用

埃弗雷特等人。(2015) 发现在潮湿的环境中往往会发现复杂的声调语言，这种相关性在不同的家庭和世界各地都成立。尽管这一因果论断获得了令人印象深刻的统计和实验支持，但在认为该论断得到充分支持之前，还需要自然语言使用的证据，例如说汉语的人会根据湿度改变他们的语调使用。否则，这种相关性可能是语言家族和语言接触历史的产物。为了说明这一点，我在一系列模拟中表明，随机选择语言，然后进行语言接触，可以以高达 83% 的概率在语气和湿度之间产生正的全局相关性，并且在至少两个不同的宏观区域内持有的可能性为 47%。在控制语言相关性时，语言接触也是造成这些相关性的原因，因为我表明，当使用 Everett 等人使用的随机独立样本测试时，他们的结果仍然有可能高达 60% 到 80%百分之一的时间。我通过对尼日尔-刚果语和汉藏语语调的进化进行系统发育分析，进一步展示了接触如何在家庭内建立相关性。语言使用的声调数量与全球五个不同区域（非洲、欧亚大陆、南美、北美和太平洋）以及四个不同语系（汉藏、南亚、亚非、和尼日尔-刚果）。这甚至比词序通用性更好的统计支持，尽管在从不同宏观区域采样时（Dryer 1992）有一些支持，但在大语言家族中似乎并不一致（Dunn 等，2011）。此外，他们引用的实验证据表明，干燥的空气具有……