Joshua McNeill"In this study, we improved the #methodology by teasing out two distinct measures: #fusion (how many #affixes #verbs and #nouns have) and informativity (how many distinctions are made)."
Yeesh. Regardless of the merits of the study, this is extremely poor framing, especially a #science #journalism article, as it's really just asking if #fusional #languages specifically are correlated with environment.
#linguistics #grammar #linguisticcomplexity #morphology
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-evolution-complex-grammars-grammatical-complexity.html
The evolution of complex grammars: New study measures grammatical complexity of 1,314 languages
Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning "the dog," to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum.