Re: What is language?

Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> [snip]
> > 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.
>
> I wonder whether that fact the vocal tract had become capable of
> producing such a wide range of different sounds did not, in part at
> least, act as stimulus to development of extra bunch of nerves & greater
> brain power. Just a thought.
This seems a very reasonable idea. Certainly, there would have much less payback
for such neural development if the sunk larynx hadn't been in place.


                                            Andreas