German: &quot;Allow me to interject, Victor. You h...

German: "Allow me to interject, Victor. You haven't found a correlation between tones and music."

The correlation is there, you can see it if you compare my musical maps with the WALS tone language map. The question is: is it meaningful -- and on that question I have an open mind, though you and Maju seem convinced that I think I've proven it. I don't. I think it worth exploring and I intend to.

"First, you acknowledged that there's no functional dependencies between the two (as there's between yodel and glottalization)."

What I'm exploring is the possibility that both the musical and the linguistic distributions could have a common cause. I am not attempting to establish a cause and effect relation between music and linguistic tone so functional dependency is beside the point.

"Second, you dismissed a cognitive science monograph that suggested that such a connection may exist, specifically between a certain type of tonal languages and musical pitch in general but you don't even have a map for the distribution of register vs. contour tones and you don't seem to care about this distinction."

Not at this point, no. One thing at a time. Again, you completely misread my intentions. I am NOT presently trying to prove anything, but simply considering some of the possibilities. When I get more time, and if this issue pans out as something worth looking into further, then I would definitely want to look at every aspect of tone language certainly.

"Third, you dismissed in-depth linguistic studies (by Blevins and others) that argued for parallel evolution and diffusion of tones in different parts of the world."

That argument is questionable because we can see that a vast expanse of Europe and Asia exists where no tone language appears on the WALS map. If tone languages were something that could simply evolve due to parallel evolution we would expect to see them scattered across the globe. Nevertheless, this is a matter I certainly intend to look in to, as the WALS map is incomplete and there could be more tone languages in this region that what we now see.