Re: What is language? (was: OT hominids)

Quoting Cian Ross <cian@...>:

> On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 08:40, R A Brown wrote:
>
> > I am sure that as soon proto-humans acquired a vocal tract (which I do
> > *NOT* believe happen to certain individual overnight!), they were making
> > all sorts of sounds; I just cannot believe that they would have been
> > content with just grunts.
>
> I suppose someone out there has already noted that the full capability
> for the full set of human phonemes didn't have to arise all at once.
> Once one has human-like lips (and enough control over them) one can make
> labial consonants.  The same holds for the mobile tongue and dental
> consonants, etc.  Maybe velars or other more-difficult (?) sounds came
> last?  In any case, once it's possible to make any kind of CV/etc.
> syllables even of the simplest sort and even with a very limited
> inventory of phonemes, human speech becomes possible.  This strikes me
> as being perhaps more like Hawaiian than like the comic-book
> stereotypes.
Making individual sounds is the easy part - the tricky one is controling
breathing so precisely you can chop an outbreath into a long sequence of
phonemes. Modern humans have a bunch of extra nerves to the breathing
musculature to faciliate this - early members of our genus, like H. erectus,
apparently had not, and so presumably were not prone to chattering. Then you
also need a brain capable of processing all this short sounds more-or-less in
real time.

The current best guess seems to be that the physiological and neurological
prerequisites for human language as we know it today was not in place until
200-300k years ago. By this time our lineage was already separate from the
Neanderthals' - I do not know if parallel changes occured in theirs.

                                         Andreas

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