Hallo!

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:24:04 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> [snip]
> >   [Homo erectus_, Neanderthals and their ilk] certainly could not talk
> > about things they could not imagine, 
> 
> Nor, of course, can we    :)
> 
> We might in hyperbole say that something is unimaginable, 
> but by the very act of thinking about whatever it is, we 
> have imagined it, even if to realize what we have imagined 
> is an (apparent) impossibility in the world as we understand it.

Yes.  When we can talk about it, we can imagine it.

> > and their imagination was apparently
> > restricted to the immediately perceivable real world.  
> 
> That we cannot know for certain - if only time travel were 
> possible!

Indeed, we cannot know, but the archaeological evidence speaks for the
assumption that their imagination was much more limited than ours.

> [snip]
> > 
> >> Most animals have a fixed set of instinctive signals, consisting of  
> >> sound, chemicals, gestures, colours or whatever, and no way to extend  
> >> them.
> > 
> > Yes.  These systems are closed - new signs could not be added.  Also,
> > they lack grammar.
> 
> I recall that long years ago when I was a teenager someone 
> gave a talk about the language of cats on what was then 
> called 'The Third Programme' on BBC radio.  I remember next 
> to nothing about the talk except that the speaker claimed 
> cats did have nouns & verbs and that verbs had two moods: 
> indicative & imperative.
> 
> I suppose it depends what one means by grammar. Trask, I 
> note, gives three definitions of "grammar", his first being:
> "The system by which the words and morphemes of a language 
> are organized into larger units, particularly into 
> sentences, perceived as existing independently of any 
> attempt at describing it."
> 
> That brings up the question of what one means by "word'   ;)

Yes.  "Word" is a difficult concept.
 
> But it seems to me there is some sort of organization of 
> elements in, e.g. bird song or the various groans, moans, 
> whistles, clicks or, with some, complex 'singing' of 
> cetaceans. I would be loath to say that these systems lack 
> any grammar at all.

Indeed.  I think it is in those cases meaningful to speak of "grammar",
even if we don't know aught about the meanings of those "songs".

> I think that, like physical organs such as eyes, ears etc, 
> communication/language was evolving over the ages and did 
> not suddenly appear with the arrival of hominins.

Yes.  It evolved gradually.

> [...]
> 
> >> I don't think he was right. Rather their language was more like  
> >> Chimpanzeese.
> > 
> > That is in my opinion an overstatement.  I think Neanderthal language
> > was more similar to Homo sapiens language than to "Chimpanzeese" in
> > many respects.  As I said above, it may have sounded quite much like
> > human language, with vowels, consonants and syllables, even with words
> > that are more or less arbitrary in their sound-meaning relation; 
> 
> The more I find out about the Neanderthals, the more 
> convinced I become that what Jörg has written in paragraph 
> above is correct.
> 
> > but
> > with more restricted grammar.  In this important point it may indeed
> > have been more ape-like than human-like.
> 
> I suspect Neanderthals did not construct sentences such as 
> Ciceronian periods; but I suspect their grammar was closer 
> to ours than to the (non-hominid) great apes.

Yes.  It would be too much to say that they did not have grammar; but
most likely, their grammars were somewhat less sophisticated than ours.
We'll probably never know, unless some cryptozoologists who claim to
have spotted surviving Neanderthals in the Caucasus turn out to be right.
(And if there are really some surviving Neanderthals, we cannot be sure
whether their languages haven't been influenced by those of neighbouring
humans, rendering the results unreliable; or their languages turn out
to be so alien and impenetrable that we cannot analyze them.)

> [snip]
> > 
> > This may be the case.  We are far from understanding the songs of birds
> > and cetaceans.  What we know is that they are often very complex; 
> 
> Exactly!!
> 
> > their
> > *meaning*, however, if that is the right words, remains unknown.
> 
> I'm sure there is some meaning there.

Certainly.  They definitely do that to *express* something; what regards
the nature and contents of that expression, however, we don't know.

In _Life, the Universe and Everything_ (the third volume of Douglas
Adams's hilarious Hitchhiker cycle), Arthur Dent finally learns the
language of birds, only to realize how boring bird-talk actually is
- they talk about wind velocities and other technicalia of flight all
the time, and quite a lot about berries.

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