Re: What is language?

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> 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.
SPOKEN human language, yes.  But, why should the first languages have
been spoken?  Why couldn't they have been sign languages?  Even
chimpanzees have sufficient manual dexterity for that.  And even without
the control of breathing, I could imagine an early hominid speaking in
short bursts.  It would've been slow, yes, but it could work.  Just as
... one can ... talk like ... this, and ... be un- ... derstood.

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