Daily Data Dump - Friday

Have a good weekend. Death of A Language. Since I started being more pro-active about my general lack of respect for modern American cultural anthropology I've gotten a lot of response. On the specific question of whether linguistic diversity is inversely proportional to economic growth, I've gotten some mixed-responses, and find all the conclusions inconclusive (I've had some r-squared results sent to me privately). Here's A Replicated Typo reviewing a paper which tentatively supports my theoretical inference empirically. As I said, looking at the correlations are now in my "stack" of "TO-DO"'s. But more broadly the normative gap between myself and my critics remains. So in the post I point to here, the author paraphrases a linguist as saying: "The languages spoken on the islands are considered to be almost 70,000 years old and are theorized to have African roots." My comments about this sort of stuff are dismissive, and ...