3 ms·

> I wonder why vowels ever evolved. Is Chinese missing vowels? Usually complexity increases because it confers some kind of evolutionary advantage.

• PepeGomez 11y ago
  How is pitch more complex than vowels?
  • rspeer 11y ago
    In fact, acoustically, tones are a lot simpler than vowels.
  • aianus 11y ago
    Pitch AND vowels is more complex than just vowels, no?
• ketralnis 11y ago
  > evolutionary advantage Language doesn't follow the same rules as biological evolution. For instance, prestige dialects often cause people to opt to use a less useful language for social status reasons. Pidgins can create amalgamated languages with essentially random features of the parent languages. Many language changes really confer no "benefit" at all, like a change from agglutination to strict word order (and back again).