A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification

Very long. One of my longest papers. It is presently 243 pages.

A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification.

Method: Chinese languages were reanalyzed to determine the number of languages in the family. The 90% intelligibility metric was used, and anything under 90% was considered to be evidence of a structurally separate language.

Results: The Chinese languages were expanded from Ethnologue's 14 to 708 languages, and there may be many more. The standard linguistic classification scheme grossly underestimates the number of Chinese languages.

I’ve been working on this paper off and on for maybe 15 years. Now it’s seems like such a monstrous mess (though it’s not a mess) that I’m terrified to even look at it again.

It’s just that there’s this whole universe in that paper and when you are working on it, it’s pretty fun, but then when you put it aside, it’s such a monstrosity that it is terrifying and intimidating to even think about working on it again.

It’s the massive size and complexi…