Re: Hobbits spoke ?

On Thursday, October 28, 2004, at 07:53 , Rodlox wrote:

[snip]
>  and would these "Hobbits" and Neandertals have spoken more in their
> throats
> or with the fronts of their mouths (principally dental sounds), given
> their
> voice box placement?
The placement of our voice boxes does not limit us to either the front of
the mouth or just to the throat. We use the _whole_ of the vocal tract
from the nose and lips right through to the glottis. If they were limited
to the front of the mouth, it implies their voice box was situated there,
which seems to me quite improbable. If their voice box was in the throat
(as I assume it was), why, if they were capable of speech, should the
so-called 'Hobbits' and of Neanderthals not have used the whole vocal
tract just as we do?

>  just wondering.
The only way to satisfy your curiosity will be to discover the secret of
time-travel   :)

As for the Neanderthals, on the one hand I have seen it confidently stated
that their primitive social structure did not require communication any
more sophisticated than that of modern apes & chimps and that the anatomy
of their skulls did not permit the range of human sounds (i.e. they did
not speak). On the other hand, however, I have also seen it stated with
equal confidence that their advanced social structure would have been
impossible without speech and that their anatomy was essentially the same
as ours (i.e. they spoke much as modern man does). I have seen it stated
that Homo Neanderthalis could not interbreed with Homo Sapiens and that
the latter simply drove the former to extinction; I have have also seen it
stated that not only could Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis interbreed with Homo
Sapiens Sapiens but that they actually did do so.

The simple fact is that we just do not know what their language, if any,
was like - sadly, they committed nothing to writing nor did they leave us
any recordings!

One thing that IMO it is quite safe to say is that the image of cave-men
communicating with monosyllabic guttural grunts at the level of "Me Tarzan,
  you Jane" type of sentence belongs fairly & squarely to the realm of
fiction.

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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