This paper discusses the impact of linguistic contact on the make-up of consonantal inventories of the languages of Eurasia. New measures for studying the importance of language contact for the development of phonological inventories are proposed, and two empirical studies are reported. First, using two different measures of dissimilarity of phonemic inventories (the Jaccard dissimilarity measure and the novel Closest-Relative Cumulative Jaccard Dissimilarity measure), it is demonstrated that language contact—operationalized as languages being connected by an edge in a neighbor network—makes a significant contribution to between-inventory differences when phylogenetic variables are controlled for. Second, a novel measure of the exposure of a language to a particular segment—the Neighbor-Pressure Metric (NPM)—is proposed as a means of quantifying language contact with respect to phonological inventories. It is shown that addition of NPM helps achieve higher prediction accuracy than using bare phylogenetic data and that distributions of different consonants display a different degree of dependence on language-contact processes. Finally, more complex models for predicting consonant inventories are briefly explored, demonstrating the presence of complex non-linear relationships between inventories of neighboring languages.

本文讨论了语言接触对欧亚语言辅音清单构成的影响。提出了研究语言接触在语音清单发展中的重要性的新措施，并报道了两项实证研究。首先，通过使用两种不同的音素清单相异性度量（Jaccard相似性度量和新颖的“最接近相对累积Jaccard相似性”度量），证明了语言接触（可操作为通过相邻网络中的边缘连接的语言进行操作）当控制系统发育变量时，对库存间差异有重要贡献。其次，一种衡量语言在特定细分市场中所占比例的新方法-邻居压力度量标准（NPM））—被提议作为量化与语音清单有关的语言接触的一种手段。结果表明，与使用裸系统信息相比，NPM的添加有助于实现更高的预测精度，并且不同辅音的分布显示出对语言接触过程的不同程度的依赖。最后，简要探讨了用于预测辅音清单的更复杂的模型，证明了相邻语言的清单之间存在复杂的非线性关系。