Re: Why grammar is so complex a subject

Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> R A Brown skrev:
>
>> But I suspect we shall not agree on this, and without time-travel it
>> is really impossible to know what the first loquent hominids did sound
>> like.
>
>
> see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Language>
I don't see how, even without the hyoid evidence, "no language" would be
  a natural conclusion.  Language doesn't require sound, after all, it's
quite possible to imagine the Neandertals communicating with sign
language.  And besides which, plenty of human languages get by on a very
restricted range of sounds, Rotokas having only 11 phonemes.  And even
if the _range_ of sounds was limited, they could've extended it via
things like length or tone, or maybe even through combining sound and
gesture.