Re: Neanderthal and PIE

ROGER MILLS wrote:

> quoting Mark Reed:
>> As far as the Neanderthal lang, what if you posit that Neanderthals
>> transmit language to their children more faithfully than their
>> Cro-Magnon successors?  Perhaps due to their creative skills lying in
>> a different area, the teaching process is more direct and thorough.
>> Then P-I-E could have been spoken as Neanderthalese for untold
>> centuries, changing much more slowly than modern human langs, before
>> being picked up and subjected to relatively rapid generational change
>> by H. sapiens.
>
> What if, by some freak of evolutionary development, the Neanderthal
> language was transmitted _genetically_?
Not a bad idea. The whole thing about human language as we know it is
that it's so inherently redefinable. Let's say that these
Neanderthals never innovated that redefinability, and communicated
with instinctive signals like any monkey, except that they had
evolved into a degree of complexity approaching a real symbolic
language. Theoretically the grammatical structures of this lingo
could be entirely different from normal ones - makes my mouth go
watery when I think about it. But that isn't relevant to your
context, of course.

LEF

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