Re: Language of saurian/reptilian beings

Christophe Grandsire writes:
 > En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:
 >
 > >
 > > Does it make sense? Well, I guess in one's fantasy anything is possible,
 > > so why
 > > not?
 > > The only thing that doesn't convince me is the argument that birds
 > > descend from
 > > reptiles as a justification for tonality. In my imagination, the animals
 > > you
 > > describe above would rather growl than sing.
 >
 > Sorry to be picky, but dinosaurs were not reptiles. We even know now that they
 > were not cold-blooded animals (but they were not warm-blooded either. From what
 > we know, dinosaurs had a system which allowed their body to warm itself up when
 > needed, without exterior source of warmth, but could also be switched off on
 > demand - to save energy -). And we have no idea what kind of sounds those
 > animals produced (to our knowledge, they could have as well sung all the songs
 > of Frank Sinatra ;))) ). But it's not implausible that the smaller dinosaurs
 > had some ranges of sounds different from growling.
 >
Now, it's known that dinosaurs differed from other reptiles in several
important respects, but I think they're still classified as reptiles
by most traditional taxonomies.  Cladistic taxonomies probably don't
have a taxon "reptilia", or if they do consider it to include birds
and mammals.

I may be wrong, of course - I'm not really up on the current state of
evolutionary biological classification.