Re: Language of saurian/reptilian beings
| From: | Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, September 28, 2002, 9:26 |
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On Sat, 28 Sep 2002 01:31, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> 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.
>
This does bring in some interesting questions of nasal resonances in human
language - eg, to what degree does having a nasal structure like ours - full
turbinates, hard and soft palate, resonance chamber, etc, contribute to the
human linguistic ability.
IMHO, I think that unless those questions are investigated, at least via the
Public Library route, you'll always be begging for answers when you should be
asking yourself questions - ie, I don't know. I haven't thought about it. :)
Wesley Parish
> Now it's true that the title of this thread is a little misleading, talking
> about "reptilian beings" and then comparing with velociraptors. It's
> difficult to compare those two kinds of animals which, beside some
> superficial resemblance, are completely different.
>
> > But, on the other hand, you will never hear me say that growling cannot
> > be
> > musical.
>
> Are you too an amateur of Mongolian throat-singing? ;))))
>
> Christophe.
>
>
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
>
> Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.